


I Stole Him

by spaceleviathan



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012), Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-01
Updated: 2013-02-10
Packaged: 2017-11-20 00:28:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 39,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/579289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaceleviathan/pseuds/spaceleviathan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They had been counting down towards The Battle of New York since two hostile forces came down from the skies in search of the tesseract. One was Loki of Asgard, and the other was his partner in crime, Tony Stark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

Loki, a bloody nuisance in SHIELD's ass and the biggest threat humanity had ever faced so far, was, in General Fury's humble opinion, a smug motherfucker.

Despite being locked up securely in a steel trap designed for when Dr. Banner gets a little green about the gills, and not metaphorically, the Æsir still managed to look like a kid in a candy store, and damned if it wasn't making the director of SHIELD nervous.

He wouldn't show it, of course, not to a psychotic alien, but he'd admit, at least to himself, that he was getting a bit antsy.

Fury had been trying to get the psycho to talk, but he wasn't holding his breath for any sort of result. He was going to leave that to Agent Romanoff, who had a certain way with people which truly shocked and amazed. Fury, on a normal day with a normal prisoner, would usually save her for later along the interrogation line, but he felt as if he didn't have the luxury of time with this particular slippery bastard. Let Romanoff trick it out of him as soon as possible and keep the body count low. Fury had absolute confidence that she'd get the truth out of him before the snide bastard even realised what her game was.

The thing that was worrying Fury, however, that they still had no clue what _Loki's_ game was, except that he wanted to take over the world and, very likely, destroy the lower life forms Loki consider humans to be. Or, at least, most humans.

Which brought Fury onto a topic he himself wanted to have a chance to talk to Loki about before Romanoff got her hands on him.

They knew the back story to this particular team-up. Fury himself hadn't been present when Loki had first hooked up with his famous partner in crime, but Coulson had. What he didn't know was what the reasons behind it all were, or why they _both_ seemed to hate humanity so much.

"He's a few rooms over, you know." Fury mentioned off hand, after he'd displayed the beautiful set up behind Loki's very wonderful cage and what would happen should the god so much as look at the glass funny. 

He noticed he now had Loki's significantly increased attention. It wasn't much, but it was something.

"He's in a similar set up to you, actually." Fury mentioned as Loki's eyes narrowed. "I wonder how long it'll take him to talk. I'll wager he's not as resilient as you." The general was bluffing. They'd only built one cage for the Hulk, and he knew that Loki's accomplice was significantly easier to keep ahold of than the god himself. Instead, they'd put the other man in an interrogation cell, waiting for Agent Coulson to drop by for a little chat, but Fury had no intention of letting Loki know that. Let the fucker squirm.

"Torture?" Loki drew from the implications. "Physical and psychological, I suppose. Perhaps you might find him more durable than you believe should you act on your threats, but would you _truly_ resort to that?"

"You came down to my planet, both of you, with malicious intent. Then you act surprised when I don't react with a pretty fucking welcome basket?"

"Certainly not for me, but for him," Loki trailed off, shrugging expressively, grandly like the rest of his body language. Everything was a performance and a more than potential lie. Fury was hyperaware that all the information he was reading off of Loki was likely just one great deception. His calm serenity, his willingness to speak, his muted surprise at Fury's chosen course of actions; nothing was definitively real. Fury caught himself mid-guess, picking out his preferences for what he'd believe and what he didn't. He firmly put a stop to that as soon as he recognised it.  

"He's not going to get any special treatment, as I'm sure you'll be glad to know. I'm betting he'll spill his guts faster than you will, potentially literally if it comes down to that." Watching Loki's expression carefully, he noticed that the man didn't even twitch. Either he truly didn't care or he was masking it. Considering the mental state of the god, either could be equally likely. On the one hand, you didn't decide to take over the world with just _anyone_. Surely there must be some amount of emotional connection. On the other, this was Loki, and he was a murdering psychopath.

"Threats towards him, director," Loki noted lightly. "May be more potent against _him_." 

Fury was getting to his wits' end. Loki was far too calm and held far too much control, despite the fact  _he_ was the prisoner. Fury snapped. "Why the hell was it _him_? What is so special about him?"

Still smirking, an eerie expression in such a severe light on such a sharp face, Loki looked Fury straight in the eye, poison green to hazel brown, and answered very slowly, "I think you know."

Fury had some idea. It was only obvious. And he wasn't the only one. Coulson had his own speculations and right now, only two doors over, he was bouncing those theories against their second prisoner: the long-lost technological genius, and the previously presumed dead, Tony Stark. 


	2. Part 1: Malibu

Tony woke up in a hospital room, scared out of his mind.

Machines were bleating his panic back at him, and he wasn't surprised when a nurse and a doctor burst in, wondering what what was going on. Tony pretended to still be unconscious, unwilling to face anyone until he got to grips with the situation.

He fervently pulled out the wires when they had finally exited, having judged him to be safe, leaving him alone again. He was hooked up to several different machines, a blood-drip included. He switched a few of the machines off at the plug when the heart monitor tried to alert the doctors that he had flat-lined.

He remembered why he must be in the hospital: the fight against Obadiah. It was only obvious.

Wounds eased by inactivity made themselves known raucously as Tony tried to stand. Groaning as every bruise, ache and twinge, he almost buckled to the floor. He retained his ground only by clinging to the side of the bed, and from there it took only a minute to reach the window which faced into the corridor.

The blinds had been firmly shut, but a peek through them revealed what Tony had most feared upon waking: a guard standing out by the door. A very SHIELD-y looking guard.

He stepped backwards, dropping the blind, more than glad he wasn't hooked up to the monitors anymore as he felt his heart-rate increase again.

He knew well enough why there was a SHIELD agent standing watch outside his hospital room, and it wasn't for his protection. Stane was dead, Tony and Agent Coulson had made very sure of that, and if nothing else then Tony remembered his father's arc reactor exploding, almost taking Tony's life along with Stane's.

And that was the crux of the matter: he'd killed Obie. Tony had known very intimately these last few months that he was a murderer; the moniker of 'Merchant of Death' was more than apt a description. He now knew the true extent of his involvmet in the death of millions of innocent people. Following, he'd ruthlessly slaughtered the Ten Rings men when he broke out of that cave, and killed the terrorists without a second thought in Gulmira.

But that was different. Not morally, perhaps, but in the eyes of SHIELD it was either unavoidable (meaning the war), self-defence (the cave) or not their problem (meaning Gulmira). None of these things had been in SHIELD's country, involving SHEILD's people, and no one that had been harmed were classified as a major issue under SHIELD's radar.

Now, however, a high-profile American citizen with great power and respectability had gotten hurt, and another high-profile American with power but a less than perfect reputation had been the cause of it. It was everything SHIELD did not want to have to deal with coming out into public light.

Coulson may be able to make a case in Tony's defence, citing how Stane turned out to be a two-faced, murdering nut-job who was dealing arms to the wrong side of a war, but Tony wasn't going to depend on the man since he wasn't quite sure how high Coulson's influence extended within the SHIELD hierarchy.

Tony knew about SHIELD, of course. Not a lot, because they had cloaked themselves pretty well, but Coulson and his men were a screaming example of under-cover agents and Tony was good at his homework.

SHIELD had a mess on their hands, and Tony was responsible. He wouldn't wager that they'd just let him loose after this; manslaughter was manslaughter and they seemed like a strict lot with a hard-on for rules. Tony hated organisations like that, if only because that meant he wasn't going to be able to escape this situation under any circumstances, no matter how much he claimed self-defence.

What was he going to tell Pepper? He couldn't just say that one boss was dead because of the other boss, and even though he was capable of proving that Stane had tried to murder Tony, that would only make everything worse; that made _both_ of her bosses killers. And one of them was now in all kinds of trouble. She may have to go on that job hunt she had so dreaded after all.

And what was he going to tell Rhodey? Rhodey, who had known him since MIT. Was Tony expected to look Rhodey in the eye and say that he'd willingly chose to murder Obadiah Stane - the same man who'd acted more like a father to Tony than Tony's actual dad ever did?

Tony leaned his head against the wall and tried to think. He ended up wondering what SHIELD would do to him. Surely not anything too bad. Then again, they seemed like _above the law_ _to make their own_ sorts. Whatever it was, it wouldn't be pretty.

Tony didn't think he could deal with this. He likely wouldn't even get a chance to tell Pepper anything, because he couldn't see SHIELD letting them near one-another. He wondered whether they'd even let Coulson get away with the roll he'd played in Tony's plans.

\---

There had been turning point in Tony's life which had led him into this shithole, and it had proven to be on the same day that Stane went batshit and tried to kill everyone in the immediate vicinity.

It was when Pepper had said that she decided to quit and, spinning smartly on one heel, had left the lab leaving Tony still gobsmacked inside.

Helplessly, the inventor had watched as the only person he thought he could truly depend on threw in the towel and climbed the stairs leading away from him. He wished that he hadn't seen it coming.

He had, to some degree, expected Pepper to have given up on him long before she actually did. The amount of ridiculous things that he forced Pepper to put up with just because they were part of his eccentric personality was a long and tiresome list, and he had often wondered just how, precisely, his P.A. managed to keep herself from going insane.

He had asked her to go to the Stark Industries head office and find whatever it was Stane was keeping hidden. When she stormed out of the lab, he realised that she was finally drawing the line.

He'd known then, as he watched her leave, that it had been unfair to ask Pepper to wade into something so dangerous with him. She didn't have anything like his new suit to back her up and ensure her safety. She just had her wits and quick thinking and the hope that Obadiah didn't catch on until long after she had vacated the building with his plans in her hands.

Tony had hoped that when the time came and Pepper left him he would feel adequately prepared for it. It wasn't as if he hadn't been expecting it.

But he hadn't been, and nor was he prepared.

Afterwards he'd struggled to force himself up and go to the office himself and get the files Stane had squirreled away on his childish ghost drive. They had been plans for a suit, Tony saw, a massive, ostentatious suit, and also, disgustingly, Tony's ransom video. He remembered a lot of that cave, and having been placed in front of a camera had been one of the most horrifying memories of them all.

When Stane appeared out of the blue, Tony thought that was the end, but he managed to keep calm and was able to leave swiftly enough with a snide passing jab. Obadiah was right behind him. Running into Agent Coulson of the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division, who was nattering on about a scheduled meeting with Miss Potts, had been a stroke of timing so beautiful that Tony had almost wanted to kiss the agent out of relief. At least with Coulson present he had a little bit of backup.

When they had left the building he told Coulson to go to section sixteen and find whatever it was Stane was hiding. Be subtle, Tony had told him. It was probably a suit of armour. And then he'd gone home to don his own.

Obadiah was waiting for him at the mansion, unfortunately. It was only by the grace of Dum-E, and Coulson's completely calm voice saying that they'd found something, that had Tony alive and in the air in time to save a few SHIELD agents from becoming smudges on the floor under the great hulking piece of metal.

Coulson had stubbornly stayed close by to the action, which at first Tony found aggravating because killing an agent of SHIELD, even inadvertently, and despite the fact he still wasn't completely sure what SHIELD was, was just asking for trouble. Coulson's obstinate attitude, however, proved to be Tony's saving grace when Stane didn't freeze as  he was supposed to and they wound up fighting on the roof above Stark Industries, attracting a crowd.

Coulson hadn't hesitated to push the button when Tony told him to. That was quite scary with hindsight, because not even the very real possibility of killing the inventor had deterred the agent from cutting down Stane.

Now in the hospital, Tony just hoped Coulson had gotten out alive as well. The man had been useful, and deep down he hadn't been all bad. A little emotionally distant, but nothing seemed to faze him and he'd been on the side of morality in the end.

\---

It was now Tony's turn to miraculously get out of something alive. He wondered if making a break for it would have the guard shooting him remorselessly as he ran down the hall. There was only so much tolerance you gave to a killer.

Tony saw that his phone was in the room with him. Picking it up, the engineer entertained the notion that maybe SHIELD weren't quite as bright as they were scary. It didn't do to let Tony Stark keep his phone. That was a sure-fire way of ensuring his quick escape. Not even the Ten Rings had done that.

He could very easily hack into the mainframe of the hospital and cause some alarms to go off to distract the guard. He could then cut the security cameras and run in the opposite direction. He could even mess with the lights if the impulse took him.

Before he did that, however, he had to get a hold of JARVIS and lock down the mansion. There was too much down there, and no one was going to get their hands on his stuff if Tony could help it. And Tony _could_. He'd be fine with thieves raid the mansion itself for all their hearts desired, but nothing in that lab was leaving the precise places Tony had left them.

Tony could have done it manually, and would have preferred being able to go home to grab a few things and maybe his favourite car, but there was no time for that. SHIELD would likely be waiting for him at home, and if he wanted to keep under the radar for a while he wouldn't have been able to take his car anyway. His newly forming plan involved something known as covertness. His cars were not covert. They screamed of money; many people didn't make enough in their lifetimes to _ever_ afford the types of things, such as his cars, which Tony took for granted.

He had a feeling he wouldn't be taking things for granted again. His stint in the cave had bullied a lot of that out of him already, but this would prove to be the final straw.

He was so determined to get away for a number of reasons, but the primary one was that he didn't want to go to prison. He wasn't particularly keen to go through a trial either, because it would ruin everything his father had worked for, and what he and his lifestyle depended on. He'd alienate his friends, who were the only people he could call family, and his liberties would be taken away from him. Everyone would blame him for Stane's evil in the first place, because until that suit came along everything, as far as the outer-world could see, had been just dandy.

They perhaps wouldn't be able to overlook Stane's under the table double-dealing, but that was only traced back so far as Stark Industries, so they could easily attempt to lay the blame for that on Tony as well.

And that was if he ever reached a legitimate justice system. Tony still wasn't convinced that SHIELD would let him go that public.

With that in mind, and the fact he wouldn't be able to say goodbye to his friends nor his robots before he left, he snuck into the hospital mainframe and cut the power to the lights and cameras, set off a few sprinklers, started the alarms, and he made sure the guard was sufficiently distracted before bolting to the right-hand corridor and slipping into another room.

Inside were two people illuminated by the lights from outside the window, and they looked to the wild man clad in a hospital gown bursting in and slamming the door behind him with surprise. 

"What's happening?" They asked worriedly, and Tony saw that the male in the bed was not hooked up to anything, so likely he was well enough to move about.

"They're evacuating this floor." He said stiffly, eying the small pile of clothes by the bed. "There's a fire on the other side. The nurses and security are starting to help people leave, but if you're capable of walking I wouldn't wait."

They left quickly enough, glancing back as if to check Tony was following. Tony made a show of exiting as well and closing the door behind him. He pointed to the next room as if that was his new destination. "I'm going to spread the word. You two should just get out."

When they were gone he went back inside and quickly changed. The jeans were a bit too large so he pulled the belt tight, and the hoodie drowned him. He knew he looked ridiculous, but as he pulled the hood over his head he was glad of it. It'd take longer to identify him if they couldn't identify so much as his body type.

He wasn't lying about the evacuation: doctors, nurses and security were starting to usher people in the direction of the exits, rolling some of the sicker patients out whilst they were still in their beds. Not willing or selfish enough to steal away the elevators when other people needed them, he joined the stream of people who were able to use the stairs.

He blended in well - they were all in a rush like he was, and to anyone watching him it wouldn't look like he had different reason to leave than the next person.

 _He_ didn't want to be arrested by SHIELD and _they_ didn't want to die in a fire; they were all in a hurry to exit the hospital. Tony wondered where he could grab a pair of sunglasses to further disguise his face.

As soon as he was outside he fled the grounds, his body protesting but his fight-or-flight mechanism working on overdrive to keep him going. He didn't bother to call off the alarms, figuring that they'd eventually discover there was no fire and likely blame a glitch in the system. Which, in all technicality, it was.

Tony knew that SHIELD wouldn't be so easily deceived, so he made sure to keep JARVIS aware of the surrounding surveillance cameras so to more easily avoid them.

JARVIS was the only companion he was allowing himself to have on this little venture. JARVIS was the most useful of all his creations, handily portable and he was programmed to ensure Tony's well-being was his first priority. Tony personally thought that he'd made too many sacrifices today in return for his liberty, and if he didn't have to give up this one thing, then there was no possibility of him doing it. He needed something to cling onto, after all.

Thus started Tony's life on the run.

He figured he'd be alright. It wouldn't be the life he was used to, sure, but he was a genius and JARVIS would do everything in his power to protect him, and all Tony had to do now was lay low for a while.

They'd be able to do it. They could make it. They'd be alright.

Perhaps not happy, but alright. 

\---

Agent Coulson had been in a debrief with Director Fury when Tony Stark went missing. He'd been half way through explaining how he'd gotten Stark to the hospital when the man he'd left keeping Stark safe checked in to tell them he'd disappeared.

Coulson had gone straight there on Fury's order, leaving the debrief for later.  _Find him, first_. _Make sure the idiot hasn't gotten himself into any further trouble_.

They found that the cameras had all gone dead at the same time as the alarms went off. It was obviously a matter of tripping the system, and it had Stark's signature on it. Not literally, as Stark didn't leave any trace that he'd been there at all, but to SHIELD that was as good as one. 

Next, they tried to follow where Stark had gone, but without the surveillance system to help them they had to rely on good old-fashioned detective work.

There was a discarded hospital gown three rooms over which had been identified as Stark's. Coulson had to assume that the man had found some replacement clothes, considering no one had reported a patient running around without so much as a thread on his back to cover his modesty.

There was no trail after that. Nothing. There wasn't even any suspicious activity on the camera footage leading away from the hospital; no sign at all of the man in any direction. Tony Stark had completely vanished.

As far as they knew neither Colonel James Rhodes nor Miss Pepper Potts had been contacted by Stark, and there had been no news from Stark's home where a few agents were keeping an eye on things in case Stane had any associates looking for revenge. Once alerted, however, they soon discovered that there was no longer any access to Stark's lower levels; it had been completely shut down and JARVIS, the mad inventor's in-house A.I., had stopped responding.

"He's gone, sir." Coulson reported to Fury dutifully.

"We'll run some facial recognition around airports and train stations," Fury replied. "And we'll keep an eye on his bank account. There's only so much he can do without money."

"I wouldn't underestimate him, sir," Coulson replied, because he, like everyone else on the globe, felt he had known the arrogant inventor had been fairly well, at least before he'd been kidnapped by terrorists. When Stark had returned home there had been a marked difference in him, and Coulson had seen it first-hand at the press conference. He'd also seen the anxiety in Stark when he'd showed up unexpectedly in place of Miss Potts for Coulson's meeting, and he'd later seen the awesome creation of the suit Stark had intitially built to fight his way out of captivity. Coulson would have underestimated him once upon a time, despite the man's staggering intelligence, but never again. Not after what he'd personally seen Stark create.

"Talk to Potts and Colonel Rhodes." Fury ordered afterwards. "Try to explain the situation to them before they see the papers."

The headlines for that morning were to be about Stane's death. SHIELD had tried to put a lid on it, but too many people had seen it happen and a body had, unfortunately, been recovered. Coulson had been too busy trying to save Stark's life to deal with the crowd control as he'd preferred to have done. A lesson learnt, he supposed, but he didn't regret putting Stark first.

Miss Potts would be horrified when she saw the news. Whilst no one had been able to see who had been in the suit which had killed Stane, they had an accurate description of the suit itself. Coulson wasn't sure about Colonel Rhodes, but he knew that Miss Potts had seen Stark's armour and would be able to identify it. Without an explanation, she'd likely come to the wrong conclusions like the papers did.

 _Obadiah Stane murdered!_ The tabloids stated. They also eagerly exaggerated the city-wide destruction both suits had been the cause of, but they certainly didn't hail the smaller suit a hero for stopping the larger one, due to the fact that in stopping it, the smaller had caused the death of a real person. If Stane hadn't unmasked himself SHIELD would have been able to cover it up as a robotics experiment gone wrong; laugh it off, because no one had died. The press wouldn't have known the difference and no bystanders would have tried to get the body out if they hadn't known there was one there in the first place.

Giving it a final once over, the only thing he found in Stark's hospital room before he left for SHIELD HQ had been the things which had been recovered from the pockets of the clothes Stark had been wearing beneath his suit. Chief among them was a small memory stick which Coulson plugged into a laptop whilst on the drive to Miss Potts' apartment.

What he found made him feel a little more confident about what he was going to say to the woman. It wouldn't make the news of Stane's death, Stark's culpability, nor his subsequent disappearance, any easier for her to hear, but at least the ransom video Stark had managed to steal from Stane would explain one or two things.

It also explained why Stark had been in such a hurry when he'd met Coulson for their meeting, and why it was immediately followed by an odd instruction to _would you and your scary friends go check out this particular container please thank you_.

What Coulson couldn't explain was why Stark had bolted.

It turned out that Miss Potts had the answer to that.

Hand to ther mouth, she had heavily sat back into her chair when Coulson presented her with the unfortunate news. She eventually managed to tell him that Stark likely fled because he'd been scared.

"I  abandoned him." She said weakly, wretchedly. "He needed me and I abandoned him."

She'd seen the video by then, and her shock over Stark's killing of Stane had twisted into a righteous nod. The woman was vicious and protective when it came to her own, and in her eyes the killing had only been self-defence. Stane would have destroyed everything and everyone in his path, especially if he'd been allowed to keep the suit, and god only knows what would have happened if Tony hadn't stopped him.

She didn't like that Stane was dead, no, but she approved of the fact he could no longer hurt her family anymore than he already had.

"Tony's all I have." She told Coulson, and the agent felt her grief keenly for a second.

"He'll come back." He found himself assuring her, despite the fact he had no idea how true the statement was. "He'll be home soon."

She managed a smile and a nod, thanking Coulson for telling her personally, before asking for a copy of the memory stick.

"It's just, I have to tell James," she explained. She didn't have to clarify herself at all, because it was her right as next of kin to Tony Stark that she have what family was owed.

"Oh," he recalled, turning before she shut the door on his back. "Mr. Stark recently took it upon himself to change a few rules at Stark Industries. He left the company to you in his absence. I know this is a difficult time for you, but you've been promoted to acting CEO." Coulson had looked that up on the way here too, it only occurring to him to research who would be running Stark Industries when he had realised that the company had lost its two biggest players in one fell swoop.

She seemed taken aback for a long moment, before weakly thanking him and finally shutting him off. He hoped she'd taken the news well.

Leaving the apartment behind, he was to head back to SHIELD headquarters and finish his debrief - now with this to conclude - to Director Fury. Then he'd get on with what was to be his new assignment and try to track down one of the greatest minds in the world when they didn't want to be found.

That was alright. Coulson had always liked a challenge.


	3. Part 2: New Mexico

Dr Jane Foster had been asleep when she was awoken by an insistent knocking on the door.

Reluctantly heaving herself from her warm bed, she glanced at the clock on Darcy's side of the room and groaned. Six o'clock. There was no call for this. No one in their right minds should be up at this time of the morning.

Misery loves company, after all, so Jane wasn't forgiving when she passed Darcy's bed, moving as loudly and obnoxiously as she was able as she went by the political science student.

Darcy made a few protesting noises, but she had also been startled awake by whoever was at the door.

"Is that Erik?" She wondered. Jane's brain had still been in reboot and hadn't come to any conclusion on who it might be before Darcy spoke up.

Excitement suddenly flooded through her, waking her up suddenly and completely. Erik had been called away a few weeks earlier after what happened with... with Thor. And whilst she'd be glad to have Erik back (he'd been taken away very suddenly, all hush-hush, by the stern Agent Coulson and his most serious of expressions), wouldn't it be even more exciting if another character from that chapter of her life re-emerged? He had promised, after all.

She threw open the door, Darcy close behind her once the woman had caught a whiff of her abrupt anticipation, but standing on the other side, disappointingly, wasn't the six foot three blond god from a different planet. Instead, somehow, despite all probabilities, it was someone even more amazing.

Jane didn't have time to be saddened once she recognised the face of the man at her door. A man who'd been missing for the last three years was standing at her doorstep. A very famous individual with a mind Jane had been more than jealous of pretty much all her life, and Jane wasn't exactly dumb.

"Tony Stark," she breathed, and Darcy choked on a lungful of air over her shoulder. Tony Stark smirked, a signature expression so commonly published in papers and magazines, and for a second he looked as if the last three years had never happened to him. If you ignore the untrimmed beard, the longer hair and the scruffy clothing, that is.

"Dr. Foster, right?" He asked, and Jane could only nod. The fact that Tony Stark knew her name was a little too much to handle at six in the morning.

Darcy, on the other hand, didn't seem to have any trouble accepting that a man officially declared dead had shown up on their doorstep before the sun had even fully risen.

"Darcy Lewis." She introduced herself, sticking out her hand which Stark took with a charming flash of teeth. He really was as handsome as they made him out to be. Jane had just cynically assumed it'd been all photoshopped and airbrushed by the tabloids and fashion rags, because there came a time when age caught up with people, and forty was typically about it. Tony Stark obviously hadn't got the memo.

"Nice to meet you. Can I come in?"

Jane realised she'd forgotten herself and her manners, and she nodded, stepping aside.

"Coffee?" Darcy asked, because they all needed a cup and despite his cheery demeanour Stark had some disquieting black smudges underlining his eyes.

"You're an angel," he said as Darcy gave him a mug, not five minutes later. They were all sat around the table in the kitchen, watching the slow rise of the sun from out of the window.

"Sorry to drop by this early," he said sheepishly. "But I just got into town a little while ago and I'm a bit short on money so I didn't want to bother with a motel, if I could even find one." It was a valid point: this town was really far too small.

"You're dead." Jane finally spoke, because it was a problem which was forming a major roadblock in her ability to articulate any sort of polite sentence in place of direct bluntness.

"Only legally." He shrugged, glancing to Darcy and Jane in turn. "And I'd prefer to keep it that way, so please, no texting or tweeting or any other form of communiqué to the outside world about my little visitation, if you would." 

"How long are you staying?"

"What are you doing here?" Which was a better question in Jane's humble opinion to Darcy's somewhat star-struck one. Jane likely would have been the same under different circumstances, because there really was _something_ about him, even discounting Stark's brilliance and charm, something that was just distractingly attractive, but Jane had been a bit caught up with thoughts of another man in these past few weeks and they were putting a dampener on her appreciation of anyone new, even someone as pretty and disgustingly intelligent as the great Tony Stark. "And where have you _been_?"

"One question at a time, ladies." He smirked, before addressing Jane's former question first of all. "I'm interested in the Einstein-Rosen Bridge you've found."

"How do you know about that?" Because nothing had been published thus far. In all actuality, Jane didn't know if she ever would publish anything about it. Yes, it had taken up years of her life, and yes it was disappointing to think her findings would never see the printing press, but she didn't know how much harm it would do if she published her experience and no one believed her. Sometimes not even _she_ believed herself. To add to the problems, it was hard to write things down when they were so personal. Objectivity had gone straight out the window pretty much as soon as she hit a seemingly drunken blond with a car.

"I hacked into SHIELD. They always have interesting things locked away." He grinned.

"SHIELD? As in the guys who came round and took all our stuff?" Darcy squawked, prompting Stark to glanced around briefly at all their stuff which, as far as he could see, had not been taken at all.

"They gave it back." Jane explained. "They did that when they realised that we could learn a hell of a lot of important stuff from this, and that we were the best people for the job of researching it."

"Yes, I read some of your work, along with some of Dr. Selvig's. I thought he was here, as well."

"He was pulled away by SHIELD. Some secret project."

Stark's expression was intrigued, and he pulled out a stupidly thin and transparent phone out of his pocket and looked to it thoughtfully. "Would you, dear?" He asked it, and a low, British male voice calmly replied that it would be his absolute pleasure.

" _It's not as though SHIELD are capable of tracing you through continual and excessive usage of your phone, or what you're trying to_ _research_." It said. If Jane wasn't so sure that was a computer, she'd be tempted to think that there had been some amount of sarcasm infused in that tone.

"Then download something else as well. Just make it look like I'm being a nuisance, like usual."

" _Certainly, sir_."

"What were - _are_ \- you doing hacking into SHIELD?" Jane asked another very sensible  question. She was proud of her rational thinking despite the ungodly time.

Darcy nodded eagerly. "I thought they're like the shadow government or something."

Stark snorted, putting his phone on the table. "Yeah, they basically are. I just wanted them off my tail, that's all. They were getting too close to finding me, so I hacked in and messed up their investigations a little. It didn't hurt them. At most, it probably made Agent Coulson a little antsy, but then he hasn't been happy with me since 2008."

"We met Coulson." Darcy injected, dejectedly. "He stole my iPod."

"He gave it back." Jane defended, ignoring Darcy's huff. Stark just grinned.

"He's probably copied all your songs," Stark said. "He has a killer playlist, that man, as I've taken the time to learn." He huffed a breath. "The amount of times I've hacked into his computer. You'd think he'd put up a better firewall. It was actually whilst there that I stumbled on some classified files, though that's not saying much because it's harder to find SHIELD files that _aren't_ classified, and hey-ho, there were your names! The files themselves were fascinating; regaling to me an odd story about an even odder occurrence regarding a E-R Bridge down in New Mexico and something about aliens. And whilst I would love to know the details of that particular tale at one time or another, I am significantly more interested in the physics you lovely ladies have to offer me."

Jane was immediately delighted. Tony Stark, here, come to talk to her about _her_ physics! She had no idea why exactly he cared however, and across the table Darcy seemed equally confused.

"Aren't you an engineer?"

"Also a genius," Stark boasted, though it wasn't much of a boast when the statement was true. "My areas of interest are excessively broad. Any and everything, as well as any and everyone." He winked. Darcy tried not to choke on her coffee.

Jane was more than happy to spread out her notes and discoveries on what had happened those few weeks ago. She glossed over the fact that there had been visitors to earth from a different planet, but then Stark knew that already.

He didn't seem to care for that aspect, though. His focus was swallowed completely by the idea of a portal to another world.

"A wormhole," he said, mostly to himself, though there was some amount of evidence which suggested that when he spoke aloud and without direction he was talking to the voice in his phone. Jane wanted to ask about that, but they were too distracted until Darcy called for lunch.

It was obvious that Stark was willing to overlook food completely, and apparently had many times, considering the pictures that'd flash up occasionally on the news had Stark looking significantly less gaunt than he was as he lived and breathed and stood and thought in Jane's main room.

It was this which prompted Jane into being firm when she told Stark - "Tony, call me Tony," - to join them at the kitchen table. Darcy had excused herself a few minutes earlier and now proudly presented three hefty sandwiches worthy of the Æsir themselves. The two women would never forget Thor's seemingly endless appetite, like he was trying to eat an entire life's worth of food; as if his body had never eaten before. Considering he was newly mortal at the time, it had technically been true.

"You'd think you're trying to fatten me up to put in your oven," Tony scoffed, but ate the sandwich happily enough. Jane finally gave voice to a few more of those queries which had been nagging at her since she'd given the coffee time to kick in.

"Why did you disappear? And where did you go?"

Tony paused mid-chew, before swallowing awkwardly. He didn't meet her eye when he answered her.

"I got into a bit of trouble. I'm not ashamed to admit that I panicked." He stared down at his plate for a long while, and the women didn't dare interrupt his internal musings. "I went out of the country. This is actually the first time I've been in America since I left."

"What could have been bad enough that you'd drop everything? I mean, you ran an entire company!"

"My _P.A._ ran an entire company," Tony corrected, trying to laugh but it wasn't potent enough to convince his captive audience of any amount of real happiness. "Now, I'm glad to note, she does it officially." 

"Pepper Potts, yeah." Darcy nodded wisely. "I'm surprised they let her stay on as CEO, actually, but she's run the company more than successfully since you left her in charge."

"She had a lot of practise before she took the job. Politics and business were never my thing."

Tony, Jane noted, had successfully managed to avoid answering any of her questions in detail, if at all. She sighed, but knew when to leave well enough alone. Anything that was so bad to push Tony Stark out of his home and into a life doing god only knows what whilst trying to keep away from the watchful eyes of a huge and terrifying secret organisation like SHIELD was obviously something incredibly private, and if he didn't want to talk about it then that was that and Jane would just have to accept it.

What he did explain was why he was 'dead'. They had declared him dead two years after his disappearance, which was far too soon by anyone's standards. Tony explained that he'd got into contact with Miss Potts and insisted she do it for him, to make sure authorities left him alone. SHIELD hadn't let up, but then Tony hadn't expected them to. 

"What are you really doing here, Tony?" Because finally coming back to America after running for three years just to look at some physics research was not, in her opinion, a reasonable motive for blowing his cover. If she were trying to avoid attention from someone like SHIELD, she wouldn't go running home into somewhere SHIELD very recently had their agents crawling all over.

He looked to Jane very seriously, and Jane's gut lurched. She knew, even without prior experience, that Tony Stark was about to propose something crazy. And, knowing her, she was going to agree.

She felt a little put out, actually. _She_ tended to be the one to suggest the insane things and Darcy would whine and Erik would put his foot down. Then again, she shouldn't be surprised: Tony Stark was a completely new level of nut-job. She knew that even before he'd come knocking on her door at six A.M. on a Saturday morning.

"I'm going to created an artificial ER Bridge."

It was lucky she had finished eating, because she wasn't sure if she would have kept her food firmly behind her teeth. Darcy's reaction was equally astounded, jaw dropping open.

Jane was flushed with emotions, and the primary one was incredulity. It couldn't be done, not with the technology they had at this point in time. The Æsir could produce an ER Bridge whenever they liked, because they were an old and advanced race that had science so far beyond human comprehension that even now Jane could have only been able to describe the Destroyer as being activated and maintained through magic, and Jane, with all her scientific heart and soul, detested the idea of magic to its very core.

Another of those pesky, confusing emotions welling up inside of her was hope, because if Tony could do it, then maybe she could see Thor on her own terms, rather than waiting by like a pathetic damsel for her prince to come a-riding to rescue her from the inescapable hold of tedium.

"Okay," she found herself saying, instead of ' _Are you insane_?' as she had intended. It wasn't like the question needed to be asked, however, because she already knew the answer.

Tony was grinning at her, wide and true and just a touch manic, like he'd had no one agree with him since he'd left his home. Since before he'd left, even. It made her unbearably sad to consider how alone he must have been, and how, even now when he was back in the country, he had headed straight here instead of homewards to where he'd left behind his friends and family.

What she recalled, all at once, was that Tony had only been home a month from a kidnapping in Afghanistan before he was gone again. They'd held him for three months and no one knew if he were truly dead or alive. When he'd come home they'd all been so relieved, but he immediately shut down the weapons division of Stark Industries, and it was then that the world recognised Tony Stark had come home changed.

Maybe he had alienated himself from the people he'd loved before. Maybe he'd never gotten over the trauma he'd been through abroad. God knows what had happened, but whatever it was, it had messed with Tony badly, gotten deep under his skin. Badly enough, potentially, that all he wanted to do was escape. That all he wanted was to leave. Leave the country, leave the continent, explore the unexplored, hide away in a crowd of people, live somewhere remote where no one knew him. Perhaps, even, if he got desperate enough, consider leaving the planet completely.

Jane didn't voice her musings out into the open air. She watched Tony carefully instead, noting not for the first or last time his weary eyes, his hollowed out cheeks, and the way he clung onto his phone as if it was his only lifeline.

She was going to help Tony as much as she could, because no one should look that sad and be forced to act as happy as he did. No one should rely on a robotic voice in a customised mobile phone when they had the chance to escape all their unhappy memories for good; to truly, honestly start afresh.

Jane had no choice in agreeing to his crazy plan. Morally, there was only one right decision, and SHIELD could very well go ahead and do something rude to a sausage for all that she cared.

They'd find out eventually, of course, that he was here, but she sure as hell wasn't going to be the one to tell them.

Darcy, looking a bit put out at the thought of the absolutely horrifying amounts of physical and practical science she was being forced to do for her extra college credits, seemed, despite it all, equally determined. It was obvious that she wasn't about to break Tony's trust to a shady government agency, either.

One for all, and vice versa.

\---

JARVIS informed Tony that there was no information on the job Dr. Selvig had been commissioned to do, and that was a sure-fire way of making Tony even more suspicious. From then on, if he had any free time, he wasted it trying to figure out what SHIELD was going to such great lengths to hide.

\---

Tony was growing exceptionally fond of the girls. They were just two rather spectacular people.

A lot of the time Darcy really had no clue what they were talking about, though, to be fair, once they got Darcy going about her own subject of choice she very quickly lost them as well. Each to their own.

Jane was brilliant. Truly, completely, exceptionally. Frightfully eager and talented, she almost put Tony to shame.  The enthusiasm she had towards their completely coo-coo project had startled Tony, and it help enthuse him as well.

When he'd suggested it, it was just a desperate idea; something of a sketch vaguely floating around in his head, just out of reach, but once Jane agreed it had very quickly became real and breathtakingly plausible.

They'd studied the readings for a few more weeks before Tony started working on actual designs. Jane herself was, of course, more than familiar with the results, so the extended study was for Tony's benefit alone, and a little bit for Darcy who still struggled with getting her head around all the figures. He appreciated her patience with him; it had been a while since he'd had to put his mind to astrophysics, but it was simple enough once he got the hang of it again. Like riding a bike.

JARVIS had been uploaded into the mainframe of their tiny little station quickly enough, and both women found him fascinating. At least at first. Now, several weeks on, JARVIS was as much of the household as the inventor had come to be. He was Tony now and officially, and Darcy had stopped looking star-struck three days in to his stay.

A few months on and they had finally come to finish their machine which looked far too crooked and slap-dash to be anything approaching Stark tech, but then that's what they got for being on a budget, even a SHIELD one.

Tony was going to test it this evening. Jane had wanted to be there, but they'd both pulled two all-nighters, and whilst Tony was more than used to it, Jane wasn't even capable of functioning on coffee by the fiftieth hour. Tony compromised, swearing not to attempt to transport anything larger than an apple before she got there. He said, considering the successes of their previous trials, it was unlikely to even make it to the apple.

He was trying out a seed first, because baby steps had proven to be effective at times, and the size of what he could transport was a good judge of where he was going wrong. So far they'd managed nothing significant, and even a seed had been rejected. Since their last trial they had fixed everything they could see to be potentially faulty, and tonight was the forth official testing night.

Tony drove up to the area in the desert fifty miles west, marked out by the intricate Celtic knots somehow emblazoned into the sand. He sat the contraption in the centre of it, and fiddled with the controls.

They'd been able to pick up the signature of the most recent usage of an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, and theoretically that should take the seed to Asgard. Hopefully. Assuming it didn't take them somewhere stupid in Asgard like a mile up into the air. Which would be fine for Tony's long-lost suit - something he still mourned with absolutely no shame - but for the average human it'd be more than a small problem.

And yes, he'd heard the story about Thor and the crazy warriors SHIELD had no name for beyond pop-culture aliases, and the metal soldier powered by magical fire. He wasn't sure how much of it he believed, but Jane didn't seem like the type to readily accept fairy stories easily, so he was trying to take it all in his stride.

Asgard would be a great place to visit. He'd heard nice things about that world from the mythology, and considering it was Viking mythology, having something described in a positive light meant it was, in modern day terminology, a veritable utopia. The El Dorado of the universe, if you will.

He fired it up when the co-ordinates blinked to confirm a lock-on (a step up from the first few experiments. Usually JARVIS was reporting error messages by this point), and then a thin blue light shot up into the sky. It looked especially spectacular against the pitch-black of the desert night, crackling like lightning, warm like a summers day.

"Test one," he said into the Dictaphone Jane had insisted he record his research into. "Inserting the seed." And, with all the grace of a freight train, he tossed the seed into the beam of light. With a blink it disappeared, and the light cut off sharply.

Stunned, Tony stared blankly to where the seed once was, and waved his hand over the area where it had vanished.

"Huh." He said, before talking into the Dictaphone. "Success! Following is now the attempt to retrieve it." Because his portal wouldn't prove to be a very good if they it was only one-way.

He turned to the machine again, answering absently when JARVIS congratulated him on his triumph, and reversed the settings. "Okay, here we go." He recorded, and set the machine to working again.

Repeated was the light piecing the night's darkness, and then, with a blink, the seed clattered back into existence with nary a scratch on it.

"We've done it!" He told the Dictaphone excitedly, grin too wide and too frenzied on his face to be considered anything short of sleep-deprived, but then again, he had just invented quick and easy universal travel. He had the rights to feel as superior as he did.

"Moving on to walnut." All he'd brought with him was a seed, a walnut and an apple. If they all succeeded he was going to try sending them in together. Jane had specified size after all, not amount.

The walnut went and came back as smoothly as the seed did, and the apple - once Tony had adjusted for organic, because you couldn't be too careful when it came to human life - also had no problems.

The walnut and the seed went together and then returned more than beautifully, and next he sent off the seed and the apple. The final test was to be the apple and the walnut, as his two biggest objects, and when he was done with that he'd hurry off back to base and jump around and attempt not to wake the girls accidentally. They needed their sleep, and they both deserved it. Even Darcy, way out of her league with this incredible, ridiculous, supposedly impossible project, had exerted herself to her breaking point trying to work with things she didn't understand, just so Jane and Tony could have the satisfaction of being cleverer than everyone else. Tony didn't know what he'd get the girl in thanks for all her supreme effort, but he was thinking he'd have JARVIS scour the internet for the best jobs a political science major could get and he'd damn well make sure someone get her that job. In Stark Industries, for preference. And he was also going to make sure that Pepper stole away Jane from SHIELD's undeserving clutches, because Stark Industries could give the scientist so much more, and she deserved that. She'd just helped Tony invent _universal travel_. He just couldn't get over it.

The problems came crashing all at once, though, and his good mood went with it, when he couldn't retrieve the seed and the apple from wherever he'd sent them.

The ability to bring back the objects had been such a monumental and positive sign, because this was travelling blind and, as before mentioned, Tony had no idea where exactly those co-ordinates were in the entirety of the universe. Once they had started human trials it'd become a lot easier to learn where to direct the machine, but initially they had no idea, and that Tony was capable of recalling the objects from where he'd sent them meant that he'd landed them somewhere solid where they hadn't moved, so not in water or air. Not being able to retrieve the seed and apple all at once meant that either that solid ground had moved (unlikely), the machine was playing up (possible, but JARVIS could report no fault or altercation from the previous, successful trials), or the objects themselves had been moved. Perhaps an alien had picked them up. The idea made him both excited, and incredibly anxious. Because he had no idea where they had been sent, it meant that he also hadn't a clue whether the alien on the other end was hostile or not. The stories of Asgard had proven there were antagonistic Æsir, such as the brother of Thor whom had so readily sent the Destroyer to kill the peaceful little town.

The issue was that, suddenly, as he tried to return the seed and apple to home, the blue light flared, stretching and writhing and thrashing about, reaching towards the heavens wildly. Tony stepped back, hands near his face to protect his eyes, posture defensive. He hoped beyond all hopes that his beautiful machine wasn't about to explode and kill him, or implode and just kill itself. Though Tony could always make another one if it was the latter option, he'd still be disappointed that the original was gone, and so much time and effort with it. Jane and Darcy would also murder him in cold blood.

The light shuddered, stuttering, flickering, and Tony wanted to go fiddle with the controls a bit more, itching to get some control over the situation, but JARVIS shouted at him from his pocket when he tried to take a step forward. The A.I. was such a worrywart.

Then, all at once, nothing. The machine bleeped once, flashing a red light, but then it returned to usual, as if nothing had happened. The light stabilised, still solidly red, but neither apple nor seeds had been returned.

Tony breathed deeply, exhaling loudly, confused and with furrowed eyebrows marring his expression, but when he tried to approach, finally confident the contraption wasn't about to go supernova on his ass, a great pulsing went through the light, only once, and a crash blew dust up into the air and the shock wave of something large impacting the ground threw Tony to the floor.

Temporarily blinded and feeling as if _he'd_ been the one to fall through the entirety of space, Tony coughed and tried to fight his way up, rubbing the dust from his streaming eyes.

He made his way towards the centre of the impact site where he hoped his machine hadn't been too damaged; hopefully somewhat salvable, that's all he asked. The dust was settling now, and the lights from the van were starting to break their way through to where Tony had been, and to his great relief the machine had toppled and seemed a bit battered, but it was still blinking at him, and the light was now green. It was reporting success. He consulted JARVIS.

"What the hell just happened?"

"An unidentified object came through, sir," he replied promptly. "Larger than what you'd intended to test on tonight."

Tony was downright gleeful at the news, spinning around, looking for something large at his feet. "At least we know it works! Something came through that I didn't send! Jane's going to kill me!" He was laughing out loud, watching his surroundings as they started to become ever clearer.

A few seconds later he spotted a dark mass near to the edge of the circular Celtic pattern and he approached it with some speed. As he came ever nearer, he started to be able to discern what the shape was.

"Jesus Christ, is that a person?"

He dragged the phone out so that JARVIS could scan the collapsed but obviously breathing creature which had come down through his artificial wormhole. JARVIS was stating that the organic makeup was not identifiable as anything on the database, which meant that Tony had definitely found himself an alien.

Coming around to see the alien from the front, he noted it was male-looking, almost stark white in his pallor, dark-haired and eerily human looking. One of the Æsir? Possible, considering the size of him. Human-sized, sure, but definitely on the tall scale. When standing the alien would tower over Tony, along with the majority of the human race.

And then Tony spotted his hands. There, clutched tightly in the alien's palms, was his missing seed and his missing apple.


	4. Part 3: Norway

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should be doing my lab report, not this.

Loki awoke with a start, eyes snapping open as he immediately hoisted his body upright. It was self-preservation, dangerous as it was to leave himself vulnerable in the place he'd found himself trapped.

A few glances around told Loki a story contrary to the situation his instincts had provided for. The sand was a new addition to the dull landscape, and the bright glare burning through the dusty dark came from a machine strikingly different to the Chitauri's significantly more advanced technology. Loki recognised this empty place from too many months ago.

"Midgard," he breathed, relaxing his tense muscles in relief, feeling worn thin from being constantly alert and drawn taunt by the prevailing sense that his enemies were watching him from the shadows. In the void, it had been true. Here, Loki would be lucky to find an enemy suitable enough to scare him. Midgard was young and weak and safe. Midgard was _safe_.

"You scared the hell out of me!" A voice invaded his quiet contemplations and immediately Loki was defensive and ready to kill. The human which stood before him raised his armed in an instinctual defence, surrendering to Loki instantaneously. The mortal's face didn't read as capitulation, however. The man buzzed with energy, his face frenzied with a grin. Whatever had excited him so greatly seemed to have something to do with Loki himself. Loki risked a glance down, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Except, he realised, for him. _He_ was out of the ordinary.

"Where the hell did you come from?" The mortal asked as Loki, judging the man to be unarmed (and even if it was, human weapons were not designed for the killing of gods in mind. He was in no danger), deliberately let loose his posture and watched as the human copied his released limbs.

"Did you cause this bridge?" Loki returned instead of answering the question, gesturing to the sky. He knew his voice was gritty, strained with the previous misuse of his vocal chords over the past few months, but the man didn't notice and, nodding, he pointed to Loki's left where a strange contraption lay on its side, humming merrily with electricity.

"Handmade here on Earth." The mortal stated proudly, whilst Loki eyed the contraption with disbelief. "It's an artificial Einstein-Rosen Bridge joining here to wherever you were. I didn't mean to drag you here though, and I think I can send you back if you'd like." The expression on the mortal's face stated that he wouldn't, in fact, like at all. The mortal would therefore be overjoyed upon learning that Loki wouldn't like, either.

"This is an impressive feat." He said, approaching what was essentially a miniature Bifrost and studying it closely. He daren't touch it, aware of how fragile everything was on this planet. The human had no similar qualms, however, and proved so as he joined Loki at the machine's side and bodily heaved it into standing up straight.

"I know." The man grinned, sitting down afterwards without a lick of modesty about him. He watching Loki from the floor, the beams of light from the vehicle illuminating his eager face. "But, loathe as I admit it, I don't want to talk about me. Let's talk about you. What's your name?"

Loki didn't deign to sit down besides the mortal. Let him continue to look up at Loki so reverently, as he should. Instead he started to look around himself to the desert he was now situated in.

"You're in New Mexico." The mortal answered the question Loki wasn't about to ask. "Another alien encounter happened a few months ago here. They say he was Thor. You know, like the god of thunder."

Loki tensed, wondering if the human knew the role Loki had played in the last human-Æsir encounter, but brushed it off as a ridiculous notion. The humans had never seen his face. Loki had been careful about that.

"It _was_ Thor." He finally answered after a long silence, in which Loki stared to the blackened horizon. The sand surrounded them, suggesting heat in the day, but the air was a whisper of ice and frost along his skin. Loki found the chill of the night suited him, as cold always had.

"Really?" The mortal sat straight, eyes ablaze with curiosity. "So you knew about when he came to Earth? You're from Asgard, too?"

Loki tried not to stiffen. He tried not to react at all, beyond sending the human a steely gaze. "I am." He was. He always would be. The events he'd been through these past months could not change that, as hard as they tried. Loki could not change that, and a part of him, hidden and safe and shivering and sane, was even grateful for it.

The human was likely going to do himself great damage if he didn't calm himself from the energized state he'd worked himself into. Or, putting it in a more precise way, _Loki_ was going to do the human great damage if he didn't calm himself down. He barked, "Stop," when the human tried to approach him, eyes running about Loki's entire body, obviously wishing to study him closer. Humans and their primitive sciences, getting excited even over people from different realms. It was ridiculous.

The human paused for but a moment under the authoritative tone, but soon set to buzzing again. Loki snarled, "I said, _stop_ ," and put a strong hand in front of the man's chest.

The mortal froze, staring down at where Loki's hand was. A sudden flash of panic was palpable about the small man's face, and Loki felt something beneath his hands. A small amount of magic spread out and snuck beneath the man's heavy coat, analysing this new finding. Loki's eyes narrowed in confusion and the man took steps back to distance himself from the god.

Loki knew a sensitive subject when he saw one, and perhaps in other circumstances he would have torn a hole through the human's defences to get answers out of him, but now was not the time. The human had built the device which had saved him, after all - the thing which had gotten him clear of the Chitauri base - and Loki was not an unthankful god.

How he'd even found the man-made Bifrost was a simple enough story. He had been confused when he'd felt the presence of strange, alien technology in the area, different and more primitive to what he'd been forced to grow used to, and when he had investigated (there was no point in bars or cells in the void when there was no means of escape) he had seen three objects appear and disappear at random intervals. When a seed and an apple came through, neither proportionate to the quality of the fruits grown in Asgard and obviously not of the void as nothing could be grown there, he'd picked them up and felt their density, their texture, looked at them critically and tried to grasp where they had come from. A flash of something where the apple and the seed had been prior to Loki moving them indicated that whatever had sent them here was now trying to retrieve them.

But why would someone send an apple and a seed to the Chitauri base? _How_ had they managed to find it the base all?

Following, Loki realised it didn't much matter. Because whoever it was, or whatever it was, had provided him an escape, and Loki was willing to take the risk that whatever was on the other side of the portal would not be as equally vile as the masters of the Chitauri. It was likely a reasonable assumption. So he had stepped into where the light had been, and allowed it to take him away.

He'd landed heavily, it seems, and it had been enough to knock him out. Not for long, but longer than Loki would have liked. _Had_ there been an enemy on the other side, and not a tiny, twitchy human inventor, then his unconsciousness, no matter how temporary, would have posed a serious problem.

But that was what being dragged into the void had been like: it had harmed him significantly, thus allowing his captors a way of subduing him. There was no reason to assume that being dragged out of it would be any more pleasant.

"How did you create this?" He gestured to the machine and the mortal offered him a slightly hesitant smirk, trying to recover from whatever Loki had discovered beneath his shirt.

"I'm clever." If the human made this himself then he most certainly was. There were many even among the Æsir who didn't understand how the Bifrost worked, yet this human had a grasp on it enough to copy and apply and build his own working model. Loki had yet to encounter someone like that in Asgard, and was more than surprised to find it on Midgard instead. Perhaps he had been looking in the wrong place all this time. Maybe Midgard's time was nigh.

Suddenly a cascade of light, flickering into a blinding intensity to form a solid circle surrounding them, forced the both of them to close their eyes and hide behind the shadows of their hands. When Loki opened them again the human was scrambling to his feet and newly appeared mortal men and women clad in black and armed with guns were approaching them slowly.

Loki wasn't armed. The Chitauri didn't trust him enough to allow him even the smallest of weapons, and for good cause. The amount of damage Loki could do with a slither of magic or the glint of a blade was monumental. In the Chitauri base his magic had been dampened by the many precautions they'd taken against him. They knew better than to underestimate the prince of Asgard. Here, on Earth, where technology had only just reached the prototype for inter-realm travel, there was nothing to stop the sparks dancing around his fingertips, nor restrain the power within him to come flooding thankfully outwards after it had been trapped inside him for so long.

Loki squared his shoulders and stood to his full height. He was ready for a fight, but he wasn't happy about it. He had just escape that wretched place thanks to the brilliance of a singular mortal, which was all the more reason why he wasn't prepared to go straight back into custody. And he would go back into custody if they got their hands on him. He was a stranger to their lands, and a hostile one at that. He recognised one of the men who stood in front of him as one of the few present when the Destroyer arrived on Earth in this exact same spot. He wouldn't allow Loki escape.

"Mr. Stark!" The man called out, and Loki glanced to his new companion curiously. The agent seemed more interested in the mortal than the god, and that made Mr. Stark a very interesting individual. Not that he wasn't already. He was a walking mystery wrapped in peculiarity, and Loki had a certain fondness for people like that.

"Coulson. Long time no see." Stark returned, lifting a hand and looking warily at the gunmen surrounding them both. "Is all of this really necessary?"

"The man next to you is not on our database, and the last time SHIELD was unable to identify something that appeared in New Mexico, bad things happened. We're just taking precautions."

"You saw the blue light, I assume. In my defence, I wasn't being an idiot, I just genuinely didn't expect it to start spitting out lightning."

"Perhaps you should have considered leaving as soon as it started to, Mr. Stark. We do keep an eye on this area for all suspicious activity, after all. We're simply sorry for taking so long to arrive."

"You _are_ cutting it a bit close, Agent. I was worried you were going to miss the party."

"I never miss a party, Mr. Stark. Especially not one that involves you."

"So, it has been you I've been spying out of the corner of my eye all these years." Stark grinned, and Coulson almost-smiled back.

"You know precisely where I've been all this time, Mr. Stark. I must say that it's good to see you home."

"I'm not staying for long. Just wanted a chat with Dr. Foster."

"We know that, too. We're questioning her and Miss Lewis now."

Stark immediately tensed, eyes hardening. The man took a step forward and said, "Leave them alone."

"Mr. Stark, you can either come with us peacefully or we can do this the hard way. And that includes you, Mr...?" He looked to Loki finally, politely despite the gun pointed at Loki's throat, with a blankness to him that Loki wanted to break. Loki had always loved the practised ones; they always had so much hidden behind their stiff, porcelain masks.

"I am Loki of Asgard," he said just to get a rise, and it was clear the man recognised the name. Loki grinned. Coulson frowned mightily.

"It's nice to see you come down to do your dirty work yourself this time, sir." He nodded, and Loki's expression displayed a few more teeth. Stark was staring now as well, and all the guns were now trained specifically on Loki. Oh, good. They all knew who he was and what he had done. It was about time they discovered who was the real threat here.

"I was concerned with other matters previously, Mr. Coulson, and a personal visit at that time was out of the question," he replied. "I only came down the once to tell my brother about our father's unfortunate demise."

"I recall being told that was a lie."

"Oh, it was, and the fool believed me."

Coulson didn't seem willing to continue on with this conversation, impatience getting the better of him despite the fact nary a glimmer of it showed across his face. "If you would come in quietly, sir," he prompted lightly.

Loki was in no mood for threats, no matter how veiled. Nor was he was willing to trust humans just because one of them showed remarkable ingenuity. Especially not when the other humans had pointed weapons at him, as well.

He glanced over to Stark, the brilliant man Loki owed for saving his skin, even unintentionally, from the wretched clutches of The Other, and he saw fear flit across Stark's eyes. It was not directed towards Loki, however, but at the guns still pointed in a close circle around them both. The human seemed to be as happy to be in this position as Loki was; he obviously didn't want to go into custody, either. He wore a look around him, stifling and uncomfortably familiar, and it proclaimed how intimately he knew what it was like to be trapped.

And then Loki made a decision.

\---

Coulson saw when Loki made a grab for Stark, but he didn't have time to react to it. Before he'd even opened his mouth to protest against any sudden movements, Loki had disappeared, taking Stark along with him.

After three years, it had been startling to see Stark again, and the man had been as thin as could have been expected from the life Coulson had been chasing him into.

Equally as startling had been the bright light emitting from a hot-zone on SHIELD's radars, starting alarms and scaring Coulson - who'd been personally present during the New Mexico assignment - as he'd believed he'd have had more time to prepare. If it was the Destroyer returned, there was nothing they could do to stop it razing the town.

Therefore, he had been thankful, albeit surprised, when instead of the hulking piece of metal come to tear the world apart, he'd found Tony Stark conversing with an alien. He'd wanted to take them both in for questioning (interrogation for Loki of Asgard), because there were one or two things he'd like to discuss with Mr Stark, but that option was now rendered moot. Once more he found himself facing a wild goose chase yawning ahead of him. Another few years of his life spent chasing his own tail.

The last three years had not been spent constantly tracking Tony Stark across every corner of the globe. At the beginning, however, all the way back in 2008, it had certainly felt like it. Agent Coulson prided himself for his limited affect and his calm, collected nature, but there was only so much patience to be found after traversing over the fifth under-developed country and trying to communicate with distrustful locals as Stark legged it in the other direction half a continent away. During that first year, Coulson had truly come to appreciate the intricate and deceptive mind Stark kept hidden under his party-going playboy routine.

The search for him had never been put off, but Coulson was too high-rank a member of SHIELD to be focused completely on a singular assignment and other, more immediate emergencies had frequently drawn him away from his task. It was important, of course, to talk to Stark and make the man realise he had made a fundamental error in his conclusions, but when the nations started at each others' throats, one man's life was a sacrifice which had to be made. Stark was an idiot for believing he had to run away, at least in Coulson's opinion, but he could also take care of himself. He'd proven that multiple times in a large and remarkably innovative variety of ways.

Pepper Potts tried to put a stop to SHIELD's mission when she declared Stark dead. She spoke to Coulson personally, explaining what had happened when Stark had got into contact with her, and demanded that if the man were to ever come home it would be because he thought he wasn't going to be locked up. SHIELD responded, rightfully, as Coulson personally thought, that their continued perusal of Stark would mean they would find him, talk to him, and then they could divorce him from his ridiculous misconceptions. The sooner they found him, the sooner he'd be home.

Miss Potts, nor Colonel Rhodes, had been satisfied with the agency, but they desperately wanted Stark back as quickly as possible and so begrudgingly left SHIELD to their own devices.

Both had demanded frequent updates on the mission if it absolutely _had_ to continue, and Coulson kept their concerns at bay by visiting them bi-monthly with a report.

Now Coulson had been placed in the unfortunate position of informing them both he had almost had Stark back. Coulson wasn't above blaming the murderous Asgardian for the verbal abuse he'd receive from Stark's best friends when he presented them with the news. Loki was already in SHIELD's bad books, and one more mark wasn't going to make any difference to his reputation.

It was good to have a face to a name however, despite the fact kidnapping was soon to be added to the alien's increasing list of felonies, and he was distinctive enough to be easily recognisable if Coulson ever encountered him again. Whereas Thor at least looked human, despite how out of place he seemed in this small, featureless town, Loki didn't give off the same effect. Instead, pale and lithe as he was, Loki seemed ethereal - so obviously otherworldly. So long as he remained on the planet, he shouldn't be too hard to track down.

His eyes had been especially haunting. Blue, Coulson saw. They had been blue.

\---

Wherever they landed, it was freezing. Tony, appropriately dressed for desert nights, thankfully, still felt the chill permeate through his coat as he clung to Loki's arm. His legs were wobbling, and they weren't likely to support his weight should he attempt to stand on his own.  

Loki was trying to nudge him off, the bastard, and when he put a bit of force into his elbow Tony was shaken loose and he tumbled gracelessly to the floor.

JARVIS hadn't responded well to the sudden lurching through space caused by god-only-knows what alien technology, but then Tony hadn't either. Where JARVIS was complaining and running diagnostic tests on Tony's modified phone to ensure he was working correctly, Tony himself was running his own form of diagnostics, and regurgitated whatever little he had put in his stomach over the last few days: primarily coffee and pretzels. He looked up to Loki, who was watching him dispassionately, neither phased by what Tony had to assume was teleportation, nor by Tony's reaction to it. A frequent flier, then, and used to dealing with people who didn't have access to the same sort of skills.

"What the hell was that?" He spat, trying to clear his mouth of the lingering aftertaste of weak, caffeinated vomit, glancing at how it discoloured the pristine snow beneath him. For the first time, he looked at his environment properly, trying to ascertain where they had landed. "Where the hell are we?"

Loki was also watching the horizon, and something about his expression spoke of surprise. Wherever they were, he obviously hadn't consciously intended to come here.

"A simple teleportation spell," he replied to both of Tony's question in the appropriate order, starting with Tony's more pressing of concerns. "Nausea is not uncommon when unused to the motion of it and it will soon wear off. As to where we are, I have reason to believe this is Norway."

"Shouldn't you direct stuff like that?" Tony grumbled, feeling worried that he may have been teleported into a wall, or spliced over two different locations. He wasn't convinced on this whole magic aspect, but he and Jane had come to a consensus over the past weeks: 'magic' was now an easier to say term for 'advanced technology'. It certainly had less syllables. Any and all utterances of the word magic and any synonyms of had been excused in the labs due to this. Their scientific integrity remained intact. Except Darcy, who started writing off the more abstract of astrophysics as magic and giving up to make herself a sandwich.

To Tony's query, Loki sent him a scathing glance which would have hurt Tony more if he wasn't still feeling queasy.

"I'm not a novice mage, Stark. I am capable of simple within-realm teleportation without the barrage of tedious preparations."

"Why here? I'm not complaining," he stood and put his hands up when Loki looked about to cut him down with his most derisive tone of voice. "I mean, Norway is as good a place as any to hide from SHIELD, but-" Loki cut across his rambling.

"I know this place. I latched onto here due to the fact I considering it a safe area of Midgard."

Tony nodded, "Well, you'll definitely be needing somewhere safe now that SHIELD know what you look like."

Loki observed as Tony came to draw up next to him, significantly more stable now and feeling better with every passing second. "SHIELD are the organisation behind the men who held we two at gun point, yes?"

"Yep, and they're not happy with you, Loki of Asgard."

Loki didn't seem surprised at the news. "I've met that agent before." He offered.

"I know, and he knows. And now you've helped _me_ escape as well, which is just one more way of making it personal."

Loki pointed in one direction, suddenly stating apropos of nothing that where his finger indicated was the way to civilisation. "Probably," he said with a snide slip of a smile, and Tony, sensing something of a goodbye within Loki's actions, grabbed hold of the vambrace outlining the alien's wrist and clung on tightly. Loki, apparently mid-spell, dropped his right hand and looked to Tony questioningly.

"Where are you going?" Tony asked, because likely it'd be somewhere exotic and unknown and on a completely different planet and Tony, ever-curious despite how many time it had almost killed him (that idiom regarding the cat definitely had something to it), wanted in. Loki seemed to read something different into his pleading.

"As interesting as the story regarding your government's hostilities towards you is bound to be, Stark, I can't imagine an empty field in Scandinavia to be the ideal place for the telling of such tales."

Okay, yes, there was certainly an aspect of shaking off SHIELD in Tony's grand escape-with-the-alien plan, but Loki should at least listen to his reasons why he wanted to go with him first before heedlessly abandoning him in the cold, empty Norwegian landscape.

"They're going to lock me up," he spoke quickly, and it drew Loki's attention. "And I don't want to be locked up."

"Perhaps your punishment should have been considered prior to committing the act." Loki rolled his eyes, grasping Tony's hand and yanking it off his wrist. "Now, if you please. I have taken you away from them, and now you can go about hiding."

"They'll find me," Tony tried to insist upon Loki's retreating back the despondent situation he was in with SHIELD. "They always find me, and one day I'm not going to be able to get away."

"I have repaid my debt to you, Stark," Loki hissed, rounding on him and stopping short Tony's brisk walk employed to catch him up. Loki's finger was pointed at Tony's face and his eyes seemed to glow. "Now you will let me be."

"What debt?" Tony asked, and it seemed to startle the pale man, confusing him.

Instead of answering, Loki returned a question of his own, drawn from him out of idle curiosity. "What _have_ you done to deserve confinement?"

Tony bit his lip, his gut reaction telling him not to answer the question because if Loki was the moral sort he'd likely drop Tony back off where they started and Tony had reasons not to want that.

But then, of course, Loki _wasn't_ the moral sort. Loki sent a robot to destroy a town just to get back at his brother. Loki wasn't concerned about killing people, and it was unlikely he'd be horrified by other people who tried to do likewise. As far as Tony and Jane could tell (along with some long-winded analysis from the political science major), the Æsir didn't seem like the more peaceful of alien races. If they were anything like the Vikings told it, they were, in fact, the exact opposite.

"I killed someone." He said, his great guilty admission, and Loki looked none too impressed. A beat indicated that Loki was waiting for more, but when Tony made no move to alleviate the silence the alien made an incredulous noise.

"I see. Stark, if that is all, I would beg of you to continue cowering from justice in the settlement to the west. Let me be."

"Loki!" Tony said, grasping for his wrist again, but Loki was quicker and curled his hand around Tony's arm instead, stopping him short.

"Stark." He snarled, low and dangerous, and his eyes were deadly blue. "I will be headed for the different realms of Yggdrasil, and many will be perilous. No realm, not Svartálfaheimr, not Álfheimr, not Vanaheimr, will be welcoming to _me_ , and never to a mortal. You will leave me alone."

Tony shook his head, grabbing at the top of Loki's arm with his free hand. "I want to come with you. Drop me off in Svarlwhatever, I don't care. I want to get away, and they can't chase me to wherever you're going. I'm tired of running!"

Loki let go of his wrist, harshly swiping Tony's hand from his arm like an flitting insect. His brows were furrowed and his lips thin with impatience. A small snarl escaped him, and before Tony could react, he was gone.

The air seemed colder where Tony stood, but likely that was the fight draining from him. Slumping, defeated, he thought about his options.

Running from SHIELD wasn't something he was a stranger too, but cohabiting with Darcy and Jane for the last few months had reminded Tony that there was something more to life than going from town to town and praying SHIELD's overpaid scientists hadn't invented stealth tech that not even JARVIS could detect in time. He wasn't banking on that happening anytime soon, but he also willing to entertain the notion. They weren't _all_ complete idiots, after all. They'd figure it out one of these days.

Ahead of him was Norway, stretching in all directions. He started to go in the direction Loki pointed him to because beyond that he had no idea where he was or where to go. He had JARVIS pull up a GPS location of the nearest town, just in case Loki was as honest as he looked to be. That is to say, not at all.

Satisfied there was civilisation in that direction, he started his slow, monotonous trek, thinking about what other choices were open to him.

It was actually easier to consider what he couldn't do: for example, he couldn't go back to New Mexico. They'd be scanning the entire country, never mind just the state, for any sign of him showing back up. Now Coulson had seen him in the flesh, there was no doubt about their security being upped. _He won't get through next time!_ Not that Tony was going to try.

He was disappointed about the fact SHIELD had gained custody of the artificial Einstein-Rosen Bridge. Hopefully Jane will be able to make a case to keep it. It was her funding which allowed it, after all. Tony couldn't even get into contact with either of the girls, because SHIELD would already be there, messing with their phones and  being very stern. Tony didn't think SHIELD would arrest two of the scientists on their payroll, but that didn't mean they had to be nice to them.

He remembered seeing something about a Dr Bruce Banner when he hacked into SHIELD's mainframe. Tony had read some of his articles as well as his impressive SHIELD file. Perhaps he could find his fellow outcast - SHIELD had him hiding out somewhere deep undercover in the Middle East - and they could be SHIELD fugitives together. Tony wouldn't mind talking to Banner about his numerous break-through papers in Gamma radiation, most especially the less officially sanctioned draft which reported his habit of getting angry and turning into an enormous green rage monster. Tony had some queries he wanted to ask.

That sounded good. Go find and irritate the doctor with anger management issues. Just an average Tuesday to Tony Stark, really. 

The closest town to him was Hammerfest, which Tony found especially funny considering the brother of the man who had dropped him off here. JARVIS was prompt to disenchant Tony of his amusements, informing him the name came from the towns fishing history and not a tribute to the Norse god of thunder.

By the time he arrived, Tony had been walking for a few long hours, and he was tired and irritated. So it was no surprise, therefore, that he didn't react well when he saw a certain someone leaning in wait for him in the shadows of one of the houses at the gates of the town.

"Come back to gloat some more?" Tony snapped, but Loki didn't respond verbally. He held out a hand, seemingly despite himself, looking about as irate as Tony was. He quite clearly didn't seem to want to do what he was about to, but, in spite of himself, he did it anyway.

"I'm going to Svartálfaheimr," he said coldly. "If you die there, it is your own fault."

Tony had questions, such as why Svartálfaheimr was so dangerous, or why they were going there if it was as risky as Loki made it out to be, or why Loki had come back at all, or why Loki was offering to take Tony with him, but Tony knew questioning it would be the wrong choice of action if he wanted to go anywhere at all.

Shrugging, putting on an air of nonchalance that Loki saw through like so much glass, the genius said, "If you insist," and he took the hand open to him.

Loki, dissuading any notion Tony might have had in regards to trust or safety, smiled at the inventor with his many, many teeth.

Oh, Tony was going on an adventure, and he realised all at once that the danger awaiting in Svartálfaheimr may not be posed exclusively by the locals. Excitement coursed through him, deep into his very bones, and he only gripped Loki tighter as the man with the evil smile whisked them both away. 


	5. Part 4: Yggdrasil

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry about not updating for a while. First I went to Berlin, and then I was distracted by ROtG feels. I'll be more swift next time. I'm half way to finishing the next chapter anyway. I had a sudden burst of inspiration.

They had left Norway barely hours ago, after Loki first insisted on scouring through Hammerfest with a sort of wistful nostalgia that Tony was both curious about and terrified of. Loki didn't seem the type for nostalgia. The type for nostalgia didn't try to murder his brother in cold blood. Whatever Loki was leaving behind when he proclaimed he was finally sick of Norway, it was potent.

Tony had stopped his mission briefly when they'd found themselves somewhere further south. They were still in Scandinavia, and it was still far too cold, and Tony explained he had something to do before their epic search for the root of Yggdrasil.

Tony had understood what that meant, even when Loki looked as if he hadn't expected him to; the inventor had been doing a lot of background reading in his spare time, and he knew Yggdrasil to be the world tree which linked the nine realms to each other. He'd also read one or two things that he was itching to clear up with the Norse god he was travelling with.

Nevertheless, he had a few small errands to run before he started bringing up awkward subjects which could potentially lose him Loki's good grace completely. They included something about a horse.

Tony wanted to drop off a Dictaphone and leaving a message.

The message was, of course, for Pepper to share with Rhodey: it was a goodbye. After all, though he didn't intend to stay away forever, he was starting anew and, as Loki had made it very clear, multiple times, repetitively, quite literally _anything_ could happen to Tony on their travels.

After that had been an ill-advised trip to New Mexico, which involved scaring the life out of two poor scientists who hadn't been expecting Tony to step into the room as if he'd never left.

Jane had been especially violent, hitting Tony on the arm even as he held out the Dictaphone as a peace offering.

"We got it back," Jane said when Tony asked about their mini Rosen bridge. "Coulson pulled a few strings, I think."

"That's nice of him." Tony allowed, before bidding adieu. The girls weren't happy with him, but they'd get over it. Tony would too. It wasn't as if he hadn't been through this before.

Loki hadn't come inside the modified station along with him, instead opting to hide in the shadows on the doorstep like a creepy vampire avoiding the sunlight. He grabbed Tony as soon as he saw that the human was going to make a snide remark and whizzed them back to Denmark. That was where Yggdrasil was, apparently.

"Why do you think we protected them from the Roman legions?" Loki explained as he flitted them across the country, seeking out magic with magic. "Why do you think they remained untainted from outside cultures for so long?"

"Because they were _Vikings_." Tony thought he'd made a good point. Loki looked about to contradict him, but he was distracted when he finally caught whiff of a lead.

"We must walk across the branches of Yggdrasil." He told Tony as he produced a golden string which he wrapped once, twice around his hand. He handed the other end to his companion. "You must not let go of this, and you must not look directly at the world tree."

"Will it turn me to stone if I do?"

Loki grinned, but it didn't make Tony feel particularly mirthful. "Much worse than anything your Greek legends can envision, I promise."

Coming from Loki, it wasn't hard to believe.

Curiosity had almost worked to overwhelm him as the time finally came for them to wander through the winding paths illuminated by the world tree. Loki had worked for hours on Tony, shrouding him with magical incantations and ceaseless chanting, trying to protect him from whatever dangers awaited. Tony felt like he should be glowing by the end of it.

"Mortals are not supposed to pass through here," he growled, impatient with himself and the fact what was supposed to be a quick trip had now stretched into days because of the unexpected human addition. "No one is. It's dangerous, and it's as likely to get us killed as showing up unannounced on Jötunheimr."

"You know that from experience?" Tony wondered, because Loki sounded suspiciously knowledgeable.

"Do I look dead to you, Stark?"

Tony considered the god for a moment.

"It is the quickest way short of the Bifrost to traverse realms." Loki insisted when Tony wondered out loud why they were even risking their necks like this.

"I _had_ a Rosen bridge! You're the one who left it behind!" Tony protested, not wanting to die no matter how much he wished to get away.

"You could have collected it when you returned." Loki returned snippily.

"I didn't know we needed it! I assumed you had a _safe_ way of travelling."

"I would sooner trust the branches than your contraption." Loki snapped.

" _You're_ the one who came hurtling through it! You didn't have to, you know. You could have used your risky fucking branches." Tony was equally as defensive of his creation as Loki was of his tree. It had taken Tony months to build that, and he wasn't going to let some Norse god from yesteryear, the same one who almost destroyed it in the first place, badmouth it. It was some impressive damn engineering, and it deserved to be treated as such.

Loki didn't seem to agree. "I did _not_ have a choice, Stark. Now, if you would kindly cease speaking."

Tony would have opened his mouth again, if it wasn't for the way the string he was holding suddenly tightened around his palm and tugged him after Loki. Loki had brought them to a piece of forest, surprisingly thick and green for the season, with trinkets hanging from the leaves, jingling in the breeze. Tony reached out to one as he passed, seeing it shaped like a hammer, but Loki stopped him sharply.

"In the past, this was a prayer site for believers. Some humans still hang things here. They know not of the significance of this forest, but they're aware it is important. They can feel it."

Tony could too. Something here prickled along his skin, almost to the point of discomfort, itching down his spine.

"What is that?" He asked, and Loki held out a hand to draw across the rime dusted trees as they past.

"It is Yggdrasil. It calls out to me."  

Tony was trying to figure out where it was coming from. It wasn't a physical presence of any kind, rather it was a humming to the air that made him want to turn tail and run. He wasn't going to, not with Loki eying him like that, because the bastard was probably testing him; another attempt to get Tony to leave. It wasn't going to work, especially not now Tony felt he'd been issued a challenge.

"Here." Loki gestured, ducking under a branch and disappearing into a dense cluster of trees. The shadows seemed to jump in rhythm with the soundless drone of the forest, and Tony could easily see why this place was considered holy. More, he could see why this particular portion of the forest had been left completely bare of trinkets. Any sane human _would_ have turned back before now.

Tony, thankfully, had never been accused of being a sane human.

He followed Loki after a moment's hesitation, the string keeping them together pulling at his hand, and he darted through the same section of branches, trying to avoid being snared on the flora. He immerged into a clearing, a perfectly rounded ring of trees, covered by the leaves overhead. It was dark here, with hardly even the flame flickering in Loki's palm bright enough to pierce through the heavy shadows.

Tony still didn't trust that what Loki wielded was 'magic', though he was getting used to the teleportation trick. He wondered whether there was a limit to the distance Loki could traverse, and that was why they couldn't simply appear in the middle of whatever realm Loki was leading them to. He made a mental note to grill Loki about it later.

"Come," the alien said, tugging at the golden string, bringing Tony into stride with him. "I almost thought you had finally been scared away."

"Show me something scary, and I might be." Tony looked up at the taller man, who was staring down at him with a returning smile which was once more nothing more than a display of his shiny, white teeth. It was the last thing Tony saw before Loki snuffed out the fire and plunged them into darkness.

"Shit!" Tony jumped, clenching his fist on the string wrapped around his palm and tugging to reassure himself that there was still someone next to him. He couldn't even see his hand in front of his face, though he did try.

There was something daunting about darkness, something overbalancing, and Tony felt like he was on the verge of panicking hardly a minute after it overcame them both. Loki wasn't talking, which was equally as worrying, and the man refused to answer Tony's queries, like _what the hell is happening_ , or, _why did you do that,_ or, _turn the damn light back on_.

It wasn't too long, though it did feel like it, before the surroundings were bathed in a gentle blue light. Loki was once again visible, having not moved from where Tony had last seen him by even an inch, and he was watching Tony with a ruthless glimmer of amusement. Tony glared at him.

"What was that for?"

Loki leaned close to him, putting a finger to Tony's lips. Tony wanted to bite it, just to see what Loki would do. Probably set his hair on fire or turn him into a flying monkey or something.

"Be quiet." He said, his voice a low whisper.

"What, or I'll disturb the tree?"

"Or the dragon." Loki chuckled, eyes alight with pleasure at Tony's horrified face. A few days ago Tony wouldn't have believed that as readily as he did. Now, after Loki's abrupt collision into his life, he was quite willing to accept the existence of dragons on a single word.

"You're joking." He stated, because there was nothing wrong with verification, but Loki shook his head.

"In fact, I'd advice keeping away from all forms of fauna here. It takes a certain mentality to survive on the world tree, and you would do well not to test them."

They went about their way slowly at first, because Tony was instructed not to look up or behind him, which cemented his desire to be contrary just for the sake of it. He was also struggling to keep his footing on the unsteady path; something he was growing to consider were genuinely giant branches. He couldn't see the floor well enough to check, for the light was too dim, but the amount of times Loki sharply pulled him back from falling down into a chasm was telling.

"If you feel you cannot resist the strain of the light, you must close your eyes." Loki instructed, when Tony abruptly halted to sternly remind himself of whatever implied horrors Loki had promised him should he glance at the tree.

"If I close my eyes, I'll fall," he said, because he wasn't doing so well as it was with his eyes open. Loki sighed.

"Then you will have to trust me."

"Forgive me for doing the opposite, moonbeam."

Loki paused, likely taking a moment to puzzle that out, before brushing it off and turning back to him, blue eyes focused intently on Tony's face, deliberately not straying elsewhere. He brushed a hand down the human's forehead, catching his eyelids gently and pushing them down.

"Come," he said, taking the hand with the golden string wrapped around it, and directing Tony forward. "We're close now." And for a while Tony believed that.

Every so often, echoing from a far distance, there sounded the patter of hooves. Even rarer, but more startling, was a nearby scritch-scratching of small claws against the bark of the tree by Tony's ear, as if something was climbing up it. Tony clenched his eyes tighter, so not to cave to the temptation to peek.

Tony did allow his eyes to flicker open occasionally, just to remind himself the world hadn't turned completely black, and to familiarise himself with Loki's determined expression which urged the inventor onwards. When Loki kept on repeating that they were almost there, Tony kept on believing him.

Loki told him to open his eyes at the same time the man finally dropped Tony's arm. Tony's hand felt cool from Loki's alien skin, which seemed to have a lower internal temperature than an average human's. Funny, but Tony was pretty sure Jane said the exact opposite about Thor; about how the Áss had burnt like a furnace. Perhaps it was a reflection of personality: Thor had sounded so bright and exuberant, and then there was Loki, who was the picture of calm and emotional detachment. Unlikely, but regarding theories of alien physiology pretty much anything could go. It was an infinite universe, after all.

"Here," Loki said, using a golden flame to draw a pattern in the air, which did the opposite of what had happened for them to get here. Instead of all the lights going out, they all turned on. Noises flooded back and Tony hadn't realised how quiet the world tree had been until the sounds of a forest came swooping in, a cacophony of both unwanted and sorely missed echoes from the world around them. Sunlight lit up their patch of ground, and birds startled from the trees upon their arrival. The smell of dew on the plant life, the musty scent of the woods, the feel of solid ground beneath his feet. It was all very familiar and it almost made Tony wonder whether they'd even left Earth at all.

"This looks like the same place." He said thoughtlessly, because despite the fact it appeared the same as home, there was definitely something amiss. Tony couldn't pinpoint what, perhaps the shape of the leaves or the low beams of the sun, but looking around certified that this wasn't the same planet he left behind.

"I'm on an alien planet." He said to himself, hardly daring to believe it. He didn't acknowledge the eye roll Loki graced him with. "I'm on an alien planet!"

"If you would stop prancing like a buffoon." Loki snapped, tugging at the string which had gone loose in Tony's palm and wrapping it neatly away. "We have much progress to make."

And so off they went, once more unto the breach. Tony had a planet to explore.

\---

They had been in Svartálfaheimr for three days, trudging through thick forests and down overgrown paths, and Loki, as far as Tony was aware, was only pretending to know where he was going.

It was cute at first, but after the first ten hours the joke started getting a little old.

Loki, of course, had denied any accusations towards having led them both astray, and the glower he'd graced Tony when he'd suggested asking for directions was nothing short of domestic.

Tony had been trying endlessly to pluck flowers from planets or leaves from trees to stuff in his pockets for when he went home, or at least had time for a sit down. He wasn't a biologist, but he _was_ innately curious, and an alien planet was too good to be true. His sciency-senses were all a-tingle.

"I found something for you," he stated as he snagged a purple bloom from its stalk and offered it over his travel companion's shoulder. Loki spared the flower a glance, before shrugging off Tony's hand.

"Those are highly poisonous." He informed Tony, and the human pushed it back to his face after a moments consideration.

"I _found_ something for you. Take it." He insisted. Loki batted him off and walked further ahead.

"You're breaking my heart!" Tony called after him, throwing the flower aside and jogging to keep up with the heinously tall man. Loki didn't appear concerned for his coronary troubles.

"What are we looking for?" He asked, as the silence stretched on a little too long. They were prone to do that, the two of them, despite the fact Tony was aware there was room for great discussion between them. Loki sometimes let himself slip, rarely, and usually late when they settled down for a few scant hours of rest, and opened himself up to Tony in a way that informed the human just how brilliant his new-found company was. Tony returned it, of course, with his own tales of wit and genius, but he was always welcoming for more. In those times, Tony realised how much of himself Loki was keeping hidden. The inventor knew that he was exactly the same. 

"We're searching for a rope." Loki replied, which Tony appreciated because sometimes Loki had the bad habit of ignoring the inventor completely.

"A rope." Tony repeated blankly. "What do we need a rope for?"

"Not just any rope, Stark. This particular rope is the strongest of all bindings."

"Kinky." He muttered, and Loki sharply let go of a low-hanging branch, forcing Tony to dive for the ground, only narrowly avoiding it. Loki snorted at him.

"It was made by a group of dwarves here in this realm. I, personally, am looking for themto make me this rope."

"So, we're actually looking for dwarves." Tony reiterated, and Loki acquiesced.

"It's doubtful you've encountered dwarves before, Stark, but I assure you that it is likely easier to find unique and impossible magical rope lying forgotten in the grass than it is find a dwarf to do your bidding. Especially my bidding."

"You're not _anyone_ 's friend, are you?"

"My life skills rather lie in the making of enemies than the keeping of friends."

"I _had_ noticed."

Loki's look wasn't quite venomous. He'd toned himself down quickly, likely accepting he wasn't about to scare Tony off with a burning glare, so he needn't go to such effort. It was a wise decision. These past few days, despite how little sleep they'd both indulged in, had put some colour back into Loki's skin, and he didn't seem as close to death's door as he had before. He still looked like he was a shade away from biting necks, but he was steadily getting further away from Tony considering offering to hammer the nails into his coffin right here and now and just get it over with, and that was largely what mattered.

"Here," Loki said later that night, passing him some rabbit broth, a little time after they had set up their meagre camp, fuelled mainly by Loki's magic. Loki had been loath to draw attention to himself by making a fire for the pathetic human, right up until Tony reminded him that if they couldn't find the dwarves, drawing attention to themselves was the best way of bringing the dwarves to them. Loki returned with, _It's also the best way to get us both killed in the night_. Since then, they'd taken turns sleeping and keeping watch. It was Tony's job to scream as loud as he could if he spotted something so Loki could wake up and leap heroically to the rescue. Puny mortals seemingly were, to every other race, nothing more than the helpless damsels of the universe.

Loki allowed Tony the fire, which was nice of him, especially since Loki didn't appear to feel the cold at all, and in return Tony allowed Loki his silly quest without too many needling questions.

"What's wrong with normal rope?" He asked that evening when it got too dark to press on in the thick woodland, as it was assuredly too dangerous when the nocturnal predators could see a damn sight better than either of them they could.

"It would be normal rope," Loki replied pointedly, sitting closer than he usually would much to Tony's surprise, effectively cutting off further discussion as he grabbed Tony's hands in his own.

"I'm not going to hurt you, you ridiculous mortal," Loki hissed as the human tried to tug away from his grip, and although Tony stilled, he wasn't happy about the position he'd found himself in.

"What are they? What are you doing to me?" He spluttered when Loki slathered some crushed berries over his palm, all the way down to his wrist. The paste seemed to shine gold in the low light, and Tony realised that it wasn't just a trick of the flickering flames. "You're putting glowing fruit juice on my hand." He said, demanding some sort of explanation.

"Yes." Loki offered in reply, voice a playful drawl Tony had teased out of him only once or twice since their fun-filled road-trip started. "Since you're a fool who picks poison flowers, I had given thought to simply leaving you to your slow and severely painful demise, especially since you wanted me to die in much the same way, but," he smeared the paste down Tony's fingers and liberally applied some more, just to be safe. "Since the flower was so thoughtfully chosen for maximum pain and torment, even if not maximum efficiency against a sorcerer, I have decided to let you live. It's the little malicious details which really define a murderer."

"I knew you liked me," Tony hoped some sort of thankfulness would come through in his tone or his expression, because he was reasonably sure that if he tried to say 'thank you' out loud, he'd choke. "What are they, anyway?"

"They're wild berries called Syggita, often nicknamed Iðunn's Apples. They grow on three of the nine realms in abundance. They have great healing properties and are usually ingested. However, they drain energy while they heal and we haven't the time to waste in our travels. Luckily, even the most incompetent of magicians are capable of transferring the magic directly through the skin, which acts quicker upon localisation."

"I thought Iðunn's Apples were actually apples." The look Loki offered him was scathing.

"Of course not. The humans of the past have taken our tales more than literally."

"Then where does Iðunn come into this?" Tony was curious. He knew about Iðunn and her crazy magical, golden apples which she kept in her garden and they ate at feasts in the halls of Asgard. They were the reasons the gods lived so long - the reason that they could potentially live forever if they wished.

"She is obsessed with apples, and keeps a vast garden of them. She has been attempting to make the most beautiful of apples with the same golden sheen as the Syggita for many thousands of years, without any success. A bi-product of her fanatical botanical fixation, however, resulted in the largest and most fruitful of Syggita berries in the nine realms. When eaten, they rejuvenate the body for a hundred years, though one can and will become dependent on them. We in Asgard learnt that several centuries ago upon an incident with a giant."

"That was your fault." Tony remembered from Wikipedia, and anger flashed across Loki's eyes as soon as the human said it. "Are you going to deny it?"

Loki glare lingered, but did nothing of the sort.

"I can quite easily forget to tell you the next time you mindlessly pick up a poisonous plant." He threatened instead, which actually had Tony considering shutting his mouth, since it was a valid concern. Almost.

"There's a covert plan in our seemingly mindless wanderings, isn't there?" Tony stated, because he was highly intelligent and could sense these things. His affirmation came from a slightly incredulous eyebrow raise. There went Loki again, underestimating his intelligence. Everyone did, even those who _knew_ how devastatingly brilliant he was. People like Coulson, who for some reason always assumed Tony would do the things he expected Tony to do, when he should assume the exact opposite.

"A plan for what?" Loki asked, stepping away and easing smeared berry juice into his own palms until it had sunk into his skin completely.

Tony shrugged. "I don't know - some grand master plan for wherever we're ultimately going. We're not seriously just mindlessly wondering over a random world on a whim for magic rope, are we?"

"And if we are?" Loki asked, seemingly genuinely curious, though Tony had quickly come to realise how good Loki was at play acting when he wished to be. It had taken a few days, but Tony finally figured out that any real emotion Loki showed him was displayed only on good faith. His anger could have been easily smothered for some fake show of dispassion, but it hadn't been; that had been Loki being truthful, because he was willing to trust Tony to some small extent.

Tony wasn't planning to take advantage of that knowledge if he could help it, if only because he was doing the exact same thing.

Anything either of them deliberately hid, therefore, would be a flawless lie that only fellow conmen could recognise, and they would then both be polite enough to pretend they never saw it.

And then there were moments when even Tony genuinely couldn't distinguish between truth and falsity, such as now, with Loki watching him so carefully. Either he did care about the answer, even if it was just out of curiosity, or he was going to use the answer against Tony in some way. Tony had to tread carefully here, unsure if now was a moment in which his new companion was a friend or a foe.  

"Are we?" Tony muttered into the fire, and Loki watched him silently for a long time.

Tony had almost forgotten how quickly the god could move, until Loki was standing straight and leaving the camp.

"Where are you going?" Tony called out desperately, and Loki sent back blithely, "To get some water."

"Oh."

Loki spared a glance over his shoulder, pausing a while to observe the human in his care, and Tony avoided his eye.

"What?" He snapped, but Loki didn't reply, turning instead into the trees. Tony clicked his tongue, and wondered whether he could find something to write on whilst they were looking for Loki's 'impossible' rope. He missed designing, and he missed paper. He had JARVIS on his phone, sure, but he had been playing up since Loki first teleported Tony away from New Mexico.

Tony turned his attention to that now, stuck on what else to do and trying to figure out the problem without access to any tools. Meanwhile, JARVIS continued his week-long sulk by doing his best impression of Darcy when presented with actual science.

"I am unsure, sir." He kept on insisting every time Tony asked _what_ precisely was wrong, echoing the exact petulant tone as when Tony replaced Dum-E with Darcy, and she'd return any request with: 'I don't even think you spoke English just then, by the way'. The difference was that JARVIS _did_ know. He was just having a strop.

Tony tucked him away after saying goodnight, curling up into a ball facing the fire, wrapping his arms around the arc reactor in his chest.

The light shone like a beacon. _Hey, come at me - I'm a puny alien with a crippling heart problem_. He was alone, with glowing hands and a glowing chest, stuck in an unfamiliar forest in the middle of the night, hyperaware of the fact there may be murderous aliens hiding behind every tree, waiting for a chance to slaughter him in seventeen distressingly inventive ways. He hoped Loki would return sooner rather than later, because, despite everything, Tony felt like he _was_ a damsel just waiting to be in distress, and Loki was the brave hero come to save him. Loki was the protector here. Loki, no matter how many threats he threw Tony's way, and no matter how intimidating he tried to be with his aloof countenance and sparkly hocus pocus, had very quickly come to mean safety. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys for the interest you've shown in this. Again, the next chapter shouldn't take me too long. I have revision I should be doing, so you can probably reliably count on me updating this fic sooner rather than later.


	6. Part 5: The Cave

They had been on Svartálfaheimr for bordering on two weeks now, with nary a rope nor a dwarf having been spied. Besides getting their hands on some apparently exciting fungus (which Tony assumed was toxic from the disconcerting glint in Loki's eyes), they had found themselves embarrassingly empty-handed.

Loki had returned Tony's complaints with, _of course we've found no dwarves in the day, you blithering imbecile, since they turn to stone in the sun_. And, _there is no rope simply lying around heedlessly because there was only one was ever made and it's currently in use at a location unknown to me, being utilised for unspeakable purposes._

Which all led Tony to beg the question, what were they still doing on this damned realm? It was stunning and all, but there hadn't been a single hotel for them to crash in, or even a medieval village with beautiful, welcoming buxom locals to ease their way. They'd been stuck outside, in any and all of Svartálfaheimr's temperamental weather, come rain or shine, with only the leaves to make their beds and the fire to keep them warm.

Loki often snapped at him to be thankful they were only on Svartálfaheimr, which made Tony very anxious about whether he truly wanted to follow Loki any further on his realm-hopping quest. Because if it was just some more of the same of this but on some even harsher realm, he was half way to considering to give up on his dignity and begging Loki to let him go back to being chased by SHIELD. At least Earth had internet connection, and hacking into whatever surveillance was around just to see Coulson's thwarted face when he realised Tony had given him the slip _again_ was worth every moment of isolation.

Suddenly, however, after so long of nil and a sprinkling of nada, Loki had stumbled upon something that got him very excited. Tony had somehow found the nerve to ask.

Loki wasn't a 'getting excited' sort. If it were Tony getting keyed up, he'd show it by manic grinning, increased hyperactivity, and likely celebrate it with a night on the town and excessive drinking.

Loki, on the other hand, had simply been out on a morning scout whilst Tony finished the leftovers from the previous night for breakfast, and when he'd returned he'd seemed as solemn as ever. Right up until he met Tony's eye and started smiling slowly.

Tony's stomach dropped and he wished that he hadn't eaten as much as he had, since it all felt like it was about to forcibly re-emerge. Loki's smiles never promised good things, and his eyes glowed with unholy glee.

That was Loki when he was excited. Tony often confused the look with Loki when he was homicidal.

Loki had explained there was an ogre hardly a ten minute stretch from where they rested and Tony made him repeat it twice just to make sure he hadn't misheard.

"What, like _Shrek_?" He asked, disbelief painting his very words a picture. Loki shook off the reference, ignorant of its meaning, but having grown used to Tony's ceaseless usage of human culture as metaphors, or increasingly ridiculous nicknames. Keeping to a Disney theme, the inventor had tried out 'Cruella' when he'd first seen Loki hunt and then proceed to skin a hare unblinkingly, peeling it like it was nothing more than an overly bloody banana, and was now on 'Briar-Rose', because there was only so much daydreaming about impossible things one could do whilst wandering through endless forests before a person completely cracked and started dancing with wild animals.

Loki had a bad habit of looking like he had crossed the line separating sanity and insanity on several marked occasions. By this point, Tony was convinced he was using the line as a jump-rope.

Sometimes Loki would wake and have a perfectly rational conversation, be surprisingly civil, and only insult Tony's intelligence and species once or twice in any given exchange. He was even once realistic enough to point out he _knew_ that his mission, whatever the sordid details may be, was unfeasible and would more than likely fail. Looking back, Tony thought he'd sounded fairly relieved about it.

And then there were times when Loki would wake up and shut down from Tony completely, refusing to acknowledge him or progress the day forward. Occasionally he wouldn't even move and just stare unblinkingly into the dense forest, lost in thought.  

Or there were days where the Æsir would hate his human companion beyond any amount of ire Tony had ever before experienced. And that was saying something, considering Tony's nickname was _The Merchant of Death_. A name like that didn't make many friends.

Those were the days when Loki spoke to him with a scathing tone of voice, like Tony was worth nothing more than the dirt beneath his boot. He'd mutter to himself, asking why he'd ever brought Tony along, and by the end of the day Tony's patience would have long since worn thin and he'd wind up screaming black and blue, swearing up a storm, all directed towards the hoity-toity magical bastard who would finish the shouting match rather abruptly with a glowing green hand to Tony's neck. Every time, Tony would be convinced this was the day when Loki was going to break it.

Those days had happened three times, thus far. At the end of every one, after Loki had abandoned him for the night and Tony was slump against a tree thanking his lucky stars he was still breathing, he'd promise he'd keep his temper to himself next time, though even he knew that was a lie. And there most certainly _was_ going to be a next time. Loki was a fucking crazy bastard.

The fact Tony was still travelling with Loki, even after crap like that happened more than once, spoke volumes about Tony's self-defence mechanism. Mainly, that he didn't have one. Sure, he always looked back with hindsight and told himself, _well, that was a bloody stupid thing to do_ , but he never learnt from it. Tony was surprised he had survived as long as he had, even prior to meeting Loki. Pissing Loki off was essentially needling a dragon, and Tony was an idiot for repetitively doing it. It never stopped him, though.

And then there were the days when Tony thought Loki had _genuinely_ snapped, because having days where he was senseless with fury at Tony was really only expected after an elongated period spent exclusively in the inventor's company. However, talking about ogres with _that_ sort of tone of voice was certainly something on the _One Flew Over the Coo-Coos Nest_ side of the spectrum.

"I don't know a lot about ogres," Tony had admitted hesitantly, because there was Norse mythology research, and then there was the entire world of mythos which Tony hadn't considered entirely relevant. He knew differently now that he and Loki had been involved in a fair few late-night chats over what was real and what wasn't, and Tony had come to accept he should never assume anything. "But I _do_ know they're not cute and cuddly." Not even Shrek himself was of the adorable type, and he was PG-rated.

"You would be correct." Loki's humour painted a bright picture across his face, lifting it to display his ceaseless joy, blinding like the sun. Days when he found _pleasure_ in Tony's company were not as rare than the ones in which he actively made Tony think he was on the verge of murder, but they were never any less startling.

"What are you so happy about?" Tony was suspicious by the elation crossing the sharp face, because that usually meant bad things for everyone but Loki. Tony would not be proven wrong.

"Caves!" He exclaimed, hands thrown to the air and body aquiver with repressed anticipation. "They live in caves!"

"There are _caves_ around here?" Tony gaped, because if there were what had they been doing waiting out in the rain when they could have slept curled up some place significantly drier?

"They're far too dangerous for a creature as delicate as yourself. Ogres, as you said, are not cute, and they are certainly not cuddly."

"What, and ogres live in _all_ the caves around here?" Because surely there had to be at least one empty one.

"No, but dwarves do." Loki said firmly, and Tony saw a crafty glimmer sparkling in those stunning blue irises. Tony caught on immediately.

"So, if we've found an ogre, we've found a cave, and if we've found a cave, we've found the dwarves."

"We've found their tunnels, anyway." Loki corrected.

"Like the goblins in _The Hobbit_?"

Loki closed his eyes briefly. "You're twisting words again. I assume you're making a reference to something, but why orcs and hobbits are relevant is not wholly clear."

Tony returned Loki's puzzled expression, offering a matching one suggesting a highly intelligent being trying to wrap his head around an unexpectedly insurmountable riddle. "Hobbits aren't real."

"Not anymore." Loki said, agreeably. "I must warn you now that denying the ogre's existence when we face it will not prove an effective defence."

Tony spluttered, spilling some water (which he desperately wished was coffee) across his dirty jeans. "What?"

"Ignorance is not going to save you." Loki shortened, but that wasn't what Tony wanted to hear.

"We're _facing_ it? Like a cowboy shootout? We don't even have any weapons! Can't we just sneak past it?"

"I tried that once, a long time ago. She could _smell_ me in her lair when she returned three days later. She then tracked me down to an entirely different realm, and almost ripped me limb-from-limb. It was only by chance that I got away at all."

Loki lifted a sleeve up one pale arm, displaying an old wound on the underside, just below his elbow, to which the word 'scar' was incorrectly ascribed. To more accurately illustrate, the phrase 'malformed' or 'misshapen' would not go amiss. It seemed like, a long time ago, a strip of muscle had been forcibly ripped from the very bone. The impression left behind in the injury's wake gave Loki's arm a deeply disturbing outline.

"That's from her claw." He said vaguely, something of a disquieting smile to his lips. "Singular, not plural." Tony felt queasy.

"I'm going to die."

Loki patted his shoulder in a show of solitarily. "Only if you're mortal." He cheerfully exclaimed, which wasn't very helpful at all.

"I could stab you while you sleep." Tony returned as Loki forcibly hoisted him up by the collar of his jacket.

"Please do. I am as excited as you are to see how that would end."

"I _could_." Tony insisted, because Loki's tone had been more patronising than challenging. Loki didn't acknowledge it as he dragged the human away.

"Our quest starts _now_." He insisted, jubilant, and Tony had never felt so alienated from another person than he had in that instant. Sure, it was glorious to finally have a lead and be on track for the first time since they left the Earth, and it was a little bit thrilling to realise they were but a chase away from a cave with an ogre and that they could potentially die, but Loki was suddenly so much more than Tony's crazy travel companion. He was something more than anything Tony had ever experienced.

The god shone, buzzing with energy and lust for action, delighted by the possibility of a battle worthy of a child of Asgard. It was something Tony would more readily associate with a warrior, that gleam in his eye which screamed for blood; more like a ransacking Viking than a dignified mage, before Tony remembered that was exactly what Loki was: an ancient, magical, rampaging Viking. Tony spent a minute just watching the Áss as if he'd never seen him before.

This was Loki in his element, and it was an element the sorcerer hadn't seen for a long, long time. The prospect seemed far too inviting for him, despite the fact this fight could quite easily slaughter them both.

"When did you last kill someone?" Tony asked with great trepidation. Loki narrowed his eyes at the question, but took a moment to consider. Tony didn't know whether the fact he couldn't immediately pinpoint a time was a good thing or a bad thing.

"It was many weeks ago. Months, even. Soon after I left Asgard." He didn't expand, and Tony had seen that expression before: once when Loki had first crash-landed into New Mexico, and then afterwards only glimpses - usually upon waking, before the god recognised where he was. The engineer didn't press for details.

"You're far too happy about this." He deigned to inform the black-haired maniac as Loki pressed him forward.

"Should I not be?"

" _No_. It's an _ogre_."

"I wouldn't be worried, Stark. It had a deer on its back, so it won't eat you alive." Loki claimed whilst they pressed on through the increasingly familiar forests. "It might kill you and save you for later, however."

"That's a cold comfort."

"Better than no comfort."

Tony was starting to find it as easy to navigate through the wilderness as Loki did, able to keep his clothing from tearing on the overgrown vegetation with increasing dexterity. He also recognised how early it was according to the position of the sun - this wasn't so impressive, as Loki had forced him to learn when Tony's constant nagging for the time became too much for the put-upon sorcerer.

"Did they really live in holes in the ground? Hobbits, I mean." He clarified in light of Loki's annoyed expression as soon as Tony started talking. It was the one Loki adopted when he didn't understand something Tony said, and was markedly different from the one Loki used when he simply didn't understand. That one was rarer. It was rather a thrill to Tony when he realised that he had his very own personal expression from Loki's surprisingly expansive repertoire.

"Quiet, Stark," Loki hissed, ducking low with Tony immediately following suit. Now level with the high bushes, the two of them could peer over them to observe the object of their tracking if they wished. They had no need to, however, as they could hear it. Worse than that, they could _smell_ it.

Tony shot an accusing look to Loki, as if it was his fault ogres didn't seem to understand the concept of a bath. "You could have at least warned me." But Loki only smiled.

It stomped past them, and Tony instinctively curled up tighter, making himself a smaller target. He had to grab Loki with his nails to stop the idiot from doing the exact opposite and standing up. He yanked the god down, only succeeding due to how out of it Loki seemed. His wild eyes appeared especially blue today, but that was probably a trick of the light.

"What's wrong with you?" He queried.

Loki only gestured for the inventor to follow him, keeping himself near to the ground (perhaps just for Tony's sake), and staying behind the hulking beast. They were south of the wind, Tony noticed, which was another thing Loki taught him, though he would be impressed if the ogre could smell anything over its own body odour.

Tony couldn't fail see it as they followed, looming great and broad and dense. Tony had no idea how Loki intended to kill it. Again, they weren't armed, not that Tony could even use a blade, and they certainly weren't strong enough to take it on in any sort of hand-to-hand combat.

Loki had magic, that much was true, but Tony didn't know how far it extended. So far, all the magic Loki had shown were greenish pot-shots at wild animals, and that was only if he wasn't able to craft a make-shift knife out of sharpened wood. Magic like that wouldn't be able to take this monster down.

Tony almost stopped in his tracks, especially when he glanced towards the maniac he had been putting so much faith in. For once, a voice, far at the back and forgotten in Tony's mind, spoke out that he was being foolish. He was trusting a madman. It reiterated his most immediate concern: he was going to _die_.

But then Loki looked back, face shining bright and energised with glee, and Tony dismissed whatever piece of residual sanity had stubbornly lingered in favour to see what Loki would do next. Whatever it was, it would be promising. Fatal, perhaps, but interesting nonetheless.

"If we corner it, it will be harder for it to defend." Loki gestured to the cave the ogre had led them to, craftily concealed behind the larger flora of the forest - most likely not by design. It had a low opening, and Tony saw the advantage to that immediately. Not only would their backs be to the only exit (as far as they knew), but the creature would be in a more tentative position than they due to its ungainly height and mass. Loki planned to turn the tables and use its sheer size against it.

It was clever, but it wouldn't work. Things were never that easy.

"You're joking."

"I only joke when things are funny." Loki returned, despite the fact he was still smiling. "This is deadly serious."

"'Deadly' also being an adjective." Tony grumbled, glancing down at the cave across from them with no small amount of terror. "Why can't we just wait for it to leave?"

"Clearly, you haven't spent a great deal of time around ogres."

"And you have?"

Loki's eyebrows furrowed, and his lips thinned. "More than you, I should wager, mortal."

Tony felt like he'd accidentally hit a nerve. He had a skill for that, as he'd long since realised. These past few days, Loki only called him 'mortal' if Tony had grievously offended him.

It was not just with Loki, but Tony was good at unintentionally stumbling upon the weak points of everyone he'd ever met. He thought he likely learnt it off his father, but perhaps his father learnt it off him. One of the major reasons the two of them hadn't been talking when Howard and Maria died had been because they were both apt at thoughtlessly saying the worst of the worst to each other. Tony remembered actually being _happy_ about going to boarding school because, even that young, he and Howard were constantly at odds. The memories of what they could and _had_ said to each other still upset Tony if he thought too long about it.

Loki was, in some ways, very much like Tony meeting Howard all over again. It was not exact, but sometimes the way Loki looked at Tony - like he was an immature, irresponsible child with no sense of pride or decency - was a direct echo of the expression Howard had about him almost constantly near the bitter end of it all.

Tony believed that this mutual sense of rubbing each other the wrong way was to do with people who were so outrageously likeminded that, excepting physical dissimilarities and one or two differing life experiences, they were practically identical. Tony had come to recognise that he and Loki were that, as Tony and Howard had been. Tony even _looked_ like his dad.

Loki had accidentally let slip that he shared a mental likeness (and hinted at a rocky relationship) with his own father as well. He said his brother shared their father's the physicality, but everything about Loki that was conniving, cunning, slick and deviant was from his father's side. He'd spent thousands of years watching the man, as he had suggested under dim firelight and the shadow canopy of the trees, so of course he was going to pick up a trick or two.

He hadn't said it in so many words - he'd hardly said anything at all, in fact - but Tony could read between the lines. The inference of the fury and resentment Loki harboured was only obvious, especially when the listener had experienced something of the like. Or, you know, the exact mirror image of.

Tony finally bundled up his courage to ask what he'd been preoccupied with since Loki suggested this mad troll-hunt. "What, precisely, am I supposed to attack it with?"

Loki simply laughed, humour returned with what was apparently a ridiculous statement, before lunging out of the bushes and speeding off towards the cave. Swearing profusely, Tony followed.

The noise drew the ogre's immediate attention, and Tony almost bolted back from whence he came.

"Holy shit!" He yelled, because even in this tiny cave, the monster was still capable of squishing Tony between his hands, or fall on him, or even just knock him out with its stench. And it was scary as _fuck_. How the _hell_ had Loki talked him into this?

Loki, he saw, was using him as a goddamn distraction. Obviously. The loud, terrified human was both disposable _and_ better off dead, as far as he was concerned. Loki might never been looking for rope or dwarves at all - just an ogre to murder the stupid mortal with.

"I'm going to kill you, Loki!" He yelled into the cave as the monster advanced at startling speeds. Tony almost tripped over his feet trying to shuffle backwards.

Something caught the ogre by the ankles and the beast smashed to the stone floor. It landed only inches from where Tony stood, and if Loki _was_ trying to squash him, that had been it.

"You missed." He pointed out, catching sight of Loki smirking from the other end of the creature whilst tying a green thread of magic around the monster's feet. The same monster who, despite having slammed its skull very audibly against the ground and probably given itself a concussion, was now attempting to get back up. Tony narrowly dodged out of its way when it swiped a hand at him, before catching the same type of magic string Loki used for its feet when the god threw it to him.

Loki himself had hopped up onto the beast's back heavily, causing the thing to groan, before bearing his weight down on one of the ogre's hands. Tony winced despite himself. He'd seen that before. Torture was torture, no matter the realm.

He held one end of the string when Loki prompted as Loki sent a shock of his power through each of the ogre's arms to make them go limp. The creature itself was yelling, snarling, spitting out words Tony could assume were incredibly colourful its native tongue. Loki seemed to understand easily enough, as each imprecation made him chuckle.

"You're really starting to creep me out, now." Tony whispered as he watched Loki tie the knot with a flourish, and Loki just winked, far too manic, it seemed, to remember how much he didn't even _like_ Tony.

"That was easy!" He spoke boomingly into the cave, hands held out wide and his smile several molars too broad. Tony almost punched him.

He didn't get the chance, however, as Loki was soon kneeling down and watching the ogre closely. The creature returned the gaze with wary yellow eyes. Let it be said that, despite the fact it was probably seeing double, the monster was as equally unnerved by the man in front of him as Tony was. It was the only sensible reaction.

Loki had no problem with pulling at the greasy mop the vile thing grew atop its cranium, pulling back the grotesque head so he could find the right angle to truly strike fear into its heart.

"You know, it used to take five of us to bring down creatures like you. Sometimes even six. Yet, I managed it solely, in merely seconds. What does that tell you?"

The creature spat towards him, and Loki snarled, pulling out a knife out of seemingly nowhere (Tony was coming to accept that was possible with Loki) and pointing it threateningly at its eyeball.

"It either suggests you're a disgrace to the name of ogres, or I am stronger than you."

"You used a human." It sneered in a voice like gravel, glancing in Tony's direction. "You were not alone."

"A _rabbit_ would have distracted you, dear monster, but I know how taken your kind is with human flesh."

Tony knew his glare had gone unseen, because Loki's attention was fixed exclusively upon the ogre that he had completely dismissed Tony from his thoughts. Even if he had seen, it likely would have done no good. Loki didn't regret things, and everything he did was for a purpose. Tony had already known it was likely he was being thrown to the wolves even as he followed Loki here.

Tony took his dismissal as an opportunity, because he wasn't the type to stand by idly whilst someone else did all the work. If Loki was telling the truth about the dwarves and their tunnels, then Tony was going to search for an entryway. If magic was only advanced technology, he could work with that. He could find it and figure it out. One day he was going to be able to manipulate it with the same ease and thoughtlessness Loki did. He swore to that.

The cave wasn't large, but it was filthy. Luckily Tony wasn't squeamish. Well, he wasn't fond of blood, and torture was the one thing Tony truly couldn't abide by, and he was avidly avoiding that pile of suspicious bones which may or may not have humanoid-shaped skulls decorating the edges, but the rest of it, no matter how filthy, was at least _not people bones_ , so Tony searched there first.

Behind his back, he could hear Loki and the ogre conversing. Considering what he knew about ogres, despite how little that may be, the creature was surprisingly articulate.

"Show me the way." Loki ordered imperiously, and if the magician had taken that tone with Tony, the inventor would have spat at him again.

"The way to what?" The ogre replied, and Loki probably didn't kick it in the head only because it was likely the disorientation that was hindering their search for answers in the first place.

"To the dwarves."

The ogre chortled, before returning, "If I knew the way to the dwarves, I would have hunted them down by now."

Loki considered this, before dropping its head without warning. Its nose crunched unpleasantly. "That's true. But the dwarves are here. They always are."

"This is my cave. I would know if there were dwarves-"

"This _was_ your cave." Loki agreed delicately, low and dangerous, and Tony skimmed his hands over the walls ever harder just to distract himself from it. "It's mine now. More precisely, the dwarf door is mine."

"Dwarf door?" The ogre tugged hard at its restraints, but despite their impossible thinness they did not break under its might. Rather, they dug deeply into its flesh and drew out seeping green blood, thick and rank and as odorous as the rest of the foul thing.

"Yes, the dwarf door," Loki continued conversationally. "They're everywhere on this realm. In every nook and every cranny. You'd think a native would know that."

"I _would_ know if there was a dwarf door!" It roared, and Loki tutted down at it.

" _I_ know there is a door here, as _you_ are here. How better for the dwarves to defend their homes from intruders than posting a clueless ogre at the door? Now, if you would kindly stop thrashing we can let you be on your way."

The ogre snorted, a hollow and sceptical sound, knowing that Loki would do no such thing. Not without killing it first.

"What does Loki of Asgard want with the dwarves?" It snarled instead. Loki murmured delightfully to himself, seemingly pleased to be recognised.

"That be no concern of yours, felled ogre."

"I heard you to be a hater of their kind, and a lover of mine!" It proclaimed, in a desperate final plea for its life.

"That I was, in more ways than one, a long time ago." Loki allowed with a crooked grin that didn't sit right with his tone. "But no more, my most belligerent of creatures, no more."

Tony didn't try to figure that one out. He supposed he could always ask Loki about it later when he'd calmed down a bit and stopped freaking Tony out.

"Hey, I think I found something!" He called, because, despite his attention being split two ways, he wasn't called a genius for nothing. He dusted his hands across a section of the wall, wiping away the grime onto his already soiled jeans uncaringly, before drawing his phone from his pocket and directing it towards a cross-section, wondering if he was just imagining it.

"JARVIS, is that something or nothing?" He asked, because it _looked_ like there was an inconstancy between down the length of the cave, potentially being a literal door. And there Tony had been half-expecting they were going to fall through the floor. "More like the Lonely Mountain," he muttered to himself as JARVIS bleeped affirmative.

" _That_ was easy." He echoed as Loki approached him, running his fingers down the imperfect line.

"It's only a crack!" The ogre was defending its intelligence, whilst Loki put a glow to the tip of his index finger, igniting a spark of flame which ran down the length of the mar in the wall. It turned no corners, however, seemingly in support of the ogre's claim. It _was_ just a crack.

But Loki didn't seem convinced. Tony let him be whilst he cast his eyes around the rest of the cave, but in the dim light the shadows rendered the walls pitch black. Without going nearer to the ogre or the pile of bones, Tony could do little else to help.

"Well, I've done my part. You sure you don't want me to do something else? Torture the ogre some more?" He snipped, still not happy about the creature's crooked hand and bleeding head. Yeah, it had wanted to eat him, but it was also snugly bound and rendered relatively harmless. But, if Loki hadn't been convinced the ogre was oblivious, then a few snapped fingers would have been the least of its problems. There was no Geneva Convention on Svartálfaheimr, apparently.

Loki, for his part, spared a glance for Tony, just for a second. That _I don't understand you, mortal_ face was back, confusion and curiosity tugging to be the dominant expression, until enlightenment showed up to claim the day.

"You were being sarcastic."

"Got it in one."

"'Tis the lowest form of wit, Stark." Loki reminded him, turning back to the wall. The human snorted.

"That's rich coming from you. What _are_ you doing to that wall?"

"This."

Without even a grunt to suggest effort, he placed his palm to the wall and pushed. A fracture broke across the ceiling, dust and rock showering suddenly down over them, drenching them in grit. Even Loki, with all his psychotic grins and frenzied energy, managed to look disgusted.

Seeing the scorn the god derived from a glance to them both so filthy eased something small in Tony's chest. It wasn't much, because if anything Loki seemed only more riled for it, but it was different from what he'd gotten so far this morning.

"Is that safe?" He asked rhetorically, pointing to the cave roof where the faults were getting ever larger, and increasingly more solid chunks of rock were pelting down on their shoulders.

"Stark, if given a choice, would you prefer to be buried alive or hacked to death by an axe? Think carefully, because this question is very important."

"I've never been in that position, to be honest."

"Say someone callously forced you into choosing one of the two, the damned conniving devil."

"The word you're looking for is 'bastard'." Tony pointed out, glaring at the ceiling rather than Loki, whom, if Tony wasn't careful, would actually receive a punch this time. "How hypothetical is this hypothetical?"

"Let us say that we can either leave through this door very quickly, or we could get crushed by rock."

"In _that_ case, I'd say the door, but you previously mentioned axes and I suddenly realised I have a phobia of them."

"How severe a phobia, Stark?"

"I'm not sure, but it's getting worse the more I think about it."

Loki nothing short of cackled. "I assume you'd like to take your chances with a collapsing cave, then. Very well, I shall respect your wishes. _I_ ,on the other hand, will test my luck down this route." He pushed again on the wall, and the cracks splintered through the rock, with new lightning-shaped fractures breaking apart the floor beneath them.

"How are you so sure it's a dwarf door?" Tony yelled over the ominous rumbling of a cave falling to its knees. Loki's hands were gripped in the original tear, which now gaping wide and crumbling, and Tony mindlessly joined in the effort. Two hands were better than one, even if Tony was as useful here as Darcy was at astrophysics. He was trying to pull at _rock_ for crying out loud!

"Because it's tearing itself apart, trying to kill trespassers before they intrude. Surely you don't believe a slight bit of magic would cause such a reaction?" Tony heard Loki reply, still as imperious as always, even when they were about to die.

"I wouldn't know." He admitted, but doubted the god heard him over the terrifying noises of the walls falling down around them. The ogre, tied down and helpless, was screaming, but Tony couldn't help it now. If he tried, he'd be killed either getting to it, or by it.

"You can get inside!" Tony realised, the tear now being just enough for Loki's emaciated figure, and Loki went to move. He stopped himself however, glancing to Tony who still had his fingers clenched around the unforgiving stone edges. Tony knew what he was thinking. Tony was slim, his life on the run had done his figure no favours, but Loki was _thin_. Supermodels quite happily sold their souls for bodies like his. Loki would be able to slide in, but not Tony.

Tony entertained the notion that Loki might actually care about that, right up until Loki vanished into the gap not a moment later.

"Fuck." He cursed, wondering if it was better just to give up now; sit down, close his eyes and wait for the inevitable.

No. Screw that. He'd go down fighting. There had to be another way to open this damn door-

The stone shifted swiftly beneath his hands, and Tony stumbled into the black space where there once had been a wall. A claw-like hand snatched him further into the darkness, and Tony just had to pray it was Loki.

The noise of the cave-in muted when the door was closed, and the only light was the dim strip of light which outlined the gap Loki had managed to slip through. Soon enough, even that was blocked up by the falling debris.

Inexplicably, in here they seemed safe. Tony turned within his captor's grasp and saw Loki illuminated by a palm full of magic fire. The engineer breathed out a sigh of relief.

"Jesus, you had me scared. How did you get this thing open?" he gestured to the door, watching the sorcerer roll his eyes.

"They open from the inside, Stark. I thought you'd realise that when there is a beast living on the _outside_."

Well, obviously. Now he said it out loud Tony's confusion seemed ridiculous.

"So, we're safe now?"

"I suppose." Loki responded amicably, a near-death experience seeming to have toned his attitude down to something approaching normal. Thank Christ.

And then a fucking battle-axe embedded itself into the rock besides Tony's ear. Looking around, they discovered themselves boxed in by men who were decidedly _not_ what Tony had come to assume were appropriate dwarf-height, and Loki's laughter started all over again. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was struggling so much with this chapter, and then I TOLD someone I was struggling, went back to it, and was done three sentences later. And here we are. 
> 
> Not completely happy with it, but I'm not sure how to fix it without scrapping it. I'm not doing that, so I'm moving on. I'll figure it out eventually.
> 
> Thanks for reading, and I hope you realise I'm going to flunk my exams because I'm writing fanfics instead.


	7. Part 6: The Dwarf Cavern

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to make an apology. I hate my writing. Like, I physically loathe it. Also, my idea of what constitutes romance is so far afield it shouldn't be called romance at all, but 'in your fucking dreams'. But, I am making you a promise: this is a frostiron. I swear. However, it's going to take a little while. But bear with me because while I don't really plan but I do know how they're going to get together. When? No clue. Sometime soon.
> 
> On another note, I also have a plot in mind. Hip hip hooray! We're realm-hopping at the moment, or we're going to be, and already I've spent longer on Svartálfaheimr than I intended, but there is a direction and below is a plot-point hidden somewhere all crafty like. Watch out for that.

Loki and Tony didn't talk to each other. Not really.

There were conversations, obviously, and one didn't go half a month with only a single other person without having one or two meaningful chats, but they'd never gotten to the heart of anything. They'd certainly never taken the time to know each other.

Not that the inventor wasn't interested in his travel buddy, who shifted so rapidly between moods and held such wit and intelligence and humour, because he was. Sometimes he'd _burn_ with it.

But he daren't ask, if only because of the few times Loki _had_ revealed a bit of himself. Those were few and far between, enough that Tony could count on one hand the occasions, but they'd been enough. Whoever Loki was, beyond what Tony knew from his wikipedia reading in New Mexico (most of which he was tentative to believe), he wasn't happy to share it. He wasn't happy to linger on it. Tony didn't quite realise how much of Loki's face _wasn't_ a mask until he'd completely shut down when Tony had asked.

Ultimately, Tony didn't know a great deal about Loki, excepting that he was the brother of Thor and he came from Asgard, and he was really _shit_ at asking for directions and really _good_ at wasting time and pissing people off.

He was also a contrary bastard, since as soon as Tony had accepted the fact he wasn't likely to see other people (as Loki seemed to be trying his utmost to avoid them), the god went and found all the natives Tony could ask for. It was nice in way - new faces, new culture, new experiences, and they didn't even need to ask for directions after all, since the dwarves were rather insistent about giving them out for free.

"That way. No, _left_ , stupid mortal." They kept on barking, or something similar, pushing the head of an axe or the pointy end of a sword against Tony's back to keep his speed steady. It wasn't a hard press, not even enough to hurt, but it had him sweating rivets from disjointed nerves.

It didn't help that he was wrapped in an insulated jacket in the sweltering underground tunnel. He hoped maybe Loki would mistake his sudden but understandable case of jitters with inopportune over-heating. Being scared was something Loki would mock him for until the end of his days.

Not that he wasn't boiling in his own skin; the further they went into the complex network of passageways the warmer it became. Loki seemed cool as a goddamn cucumber, as per usual, and the dwarves were used to it, but Tony was starting to struggle. He didn't dare take his coat off, however, in case it was taken from him. It was the only thing that was really seeing him through the night; the fire only helped so much.

They arrived at their location shortly, though Tony was hyperaware that had they not had their polite tour-guides to lead them, or shove them, in the right direction they would have gotten very lost very quickly. Maybe Loki had a spell for that or something, because otherwise they would have starved to death without finding the dwarves at all, gone astray in the web of tunnels forever. Why the dwarves even needed the ogres at their doors when their lobby was a death-trap in itself was lost on Tony.

When they stepped out of the maze, the group was confronted by a massive, completely enclosed cavern hollowed out of what may have very well been a mountain. It was obviously the centre of the sprawling labyrinth, and it was a home as well as a work-place. From Tony's vantage point - high up with a long set of steps lining the wall looming before him - he could map out the differing areas, could see children playing in one corner, whilst people hammered away at their anvils or placed their crafts in the kilns in another. It was a city, and from here it seemed small, but Tony could recognise it as a trick of the eye. It was one level of hundreds, dug into the walls and connected by the steps and the tunnels chipped out of the mountain, joined to the outside world by the caves they let the ogres guard.

Tony felt a bit conned as he looked around the vast cavern, because this was the fantasy world come to life; accurate to mostly every author, or film, or comic released. It took the amazement out of his gaze, because he'd seen it all before. He wondered how the human stereotype even came to be so accurate.

What _was_ wrong with the real dwarves compared to fiction was that the dwarves of reality weren't _dwarf-sized_. They looked as they should, wrapped in leathers and furs with some truly magnificent beards, and they certainly acted congruently to what Tony had been preparing himself to expect, but it threw him that they weren't short. In fact, a fair few of them were taller than Tony.

None, however, were as tall as Loki. Assuming the gods of Asgard were all as unfairly sized as Loki was, perhaps it had been the Æsir who thought them small, and thus where the assumption had come from. 

Tony hesitated at the top of the stairs, wary of the fact there were no handrails or even-levelled steps. There was not, in fact, any safety protocol so to speak of. Tony wondered how far down he'd manage to get before he tripped over his own feet and stumbled a long, long way down to his death. Would it kill the so-called 'advanced race' to build a damn elevator? Because not building one was going to kill _him_.

The dwarf behind Tony prodded him again with his sword. Tony half-wondered if the guy was trying to tell him something. In his fear of the stairs and subsequent absence of sense, the inventor was about to make an innuendo pertaining to phallic symbolism when Loki took time to look back and snort at Tony hovering at the top of the stairs.

"Scared of heights, Stark?"

Tony sneered back. "I built a machine which could fly."

"Be quiet!" The dwarf snapped, and shoved Tony hard enough that he almost tripped then and there. Loki wouldn't thank him for that, because if Tony fell, Loki, who was seven steps ahead of him, would be coming along for the ride. On the bright side, they'd have at least three dwarves to cushion their landing, along with whoever else was unfortunate to be in their way when they came snowballing down to the bottom.

"Careful!" Tony admonished, catching himself last minute. "My life flashed before my eyes."

Loki chuckled lowly, just quietly enough to be heard but not enough to be reprimanded for it.

Tony considering it a miracle when they touched down on even ground, thanking one god or another for his safe journey, before revising his gratitude when he was confronted with a group of warriors wearing frowns serious enough to give Coulson a run for his money. Tony would sooner swap his underground labs and all his cars before admitting he immediately ducked behind the green-clad god.

To be fair they weren't paying _him_ any attention. Even Loki, usually so quick to notice an opportunity to take the piss out of the stupid human, was ignorant to him. He was preoccupied this time, staring down the scary-faced new-comers.

The inventor felt he had a right to be nervous. They weren't just carrying around your average sword or axe - their various weapons were the size of Tony, and they all had more than one strapped to them, glinting in the low light of the blazing fires. Each one of their faces, what you could see under the beards, were disfigured or half-missing from wounds and battle-scars, and one or two having various limbs absent didn't make Tony doubt their ability as fighters. It was just further proof they were the best of the best. The human tried to imagine losing an arm and being capable of continuing on as he had before. Without constructing himself a robotic prostethic he didn't think he'd be able to cope.

The closest one - a woman whose head came to the bottom of Loki's nose - pointed the business end of a very sharp, ornately curved blade at his neck. It was carved deep with runes and bright with what Tony assumed could only be magic. Nothing else flashed quite so deadly in such a dull light.

Loki didn't react to the unspoken threat, pointedly staring the dwarf down. To her credit, the dwarf warrior didn't back down.

"Loki of Asgard," she eventually said. "Odinson. I am Odåni, heir of Kazlel."

Loki nodded stiffly, having heard that name before. He was polite enough, if not terribly sincere.

"Why are you here? The whispers I hear speak of your disappearance after a particularly disagreeable act." She asked.

If that didn't spark a flame of curiosity in Tony's forsaken soul very little else would. He glanced to Loki inquisitively, feeling safe enough to take his eyes off the armed guards when he was just a puny human who posed no threat.

"I need something from you." Loki replied, ignoring the latter of the sentences, smiling unpleasantly. He was still slightly high from his bout of mania, still buzzing with it, trying desperately now to restrain it since he had business to attend to.

Odåni barked shortly, a mocking laugh which Loki's smile strained at, his shoulders tensing but otherwise giving off no tells.

"You?" She said, pointing her weapon a little closer to Loki's throat. Loki didn't deign to react.

"Aye. Me."

"What could it be the disgraced prince of Asgard wishes from the lowly dwarves?" It wasn't only Odåni who was smiling, enjoying her game with her prisoners, finding it riotous that royalty had sunk so low. Tony could only tell she had struck a nerve because he was standing directly behind Loki and could _feel_ the twitch that shuddered through him.

"Gleipnir."

One word, meaningless to Tony, certainly meant something to the dwarves; it stopped them short. Then, the front-most one spoke again, no longer mocking, now crossing into the territory of fully threatening.

"You believe us so thick-witted to hand _you_ over a chain such as Gleipnir."

Loki was a flawless liar, but so was Tony, and Tony knew that the mage only said "Yes," with such scornful derision to piss the small woman off.

They all reacted uproariously, overdramatically, quickly burdening themselves with arms soon pointed towards their two prisoners. Despite himself, and regardless of the fact it was _Loki's goddamn fault_ Tony was now at very real risk of impalement, he shuffled closer to the taller man, pressing his back against Loki's ornate leather coat.

"He's joking!" The inventor found himself yelling, trying to get himself heard over snarling, stereotypically irrational dwarves who couldn't see a return bout of mockery when it spat them in the face. "Jesus Christ, he's joking!"

They hesitated for a second, glancing to the mortal for seemingly the first time, long enough at least for Loki to take the chance to tut disappointedly and tell his companion he was a spoilsport. He used more flamboyant words in his typical _Shakespeare in the Park_ manner, but Tony was skilled at not listening to more of an insult than what was necessary and had tuned perhaps sixty percent of it out. What it essentially boiled down to was that Tony sucked for ruining his gag.

"You're not funny, and you should stop trying to be." He replied heatedly to the god, wanting nothing more than to kick Loki in the shins. Instead he pressed a bit further into the man when he realised how close he was to losing his nose to a dwarf that didn't even reach _Tony's_ chin.

"Who is this mortal?" Odåni asked, and Tony had started to realise just how much power the heir of Kazlul - whatever that was - held. Her soldiers followed her like a general. She certainly looked the part. Her shrewd eyes were sunken deep into a battle-worn face, and her hair and beard were more grey than brown. She seemed the type capable of directing thousands of war-happy warriors as well as competently discussing politics with different races across the cosmos. Loki, however, had apparently earned himself some special treatment that had nothing to do with diplomacy.

That did not surprise Tony one iota.

"My name is Tony Stark," he introduced when he realised Loki wasn't about to come and save him from the attention he'd drawn to himself, the bastard. "I'm from Earth- Midgard, I meant Midgard." He corrected when an elbow caught his side. Which was actually odd, considering that when he looked Loki hadn't actually moved.

The dwarf narrowed her eyes at Tony and Tony didn't like that at all. He recognised a test when he saw one, and Loki wouldn't be the only one in the universe to attest to the fact Tony didn't back down when he felt he'd been issued a challenge. He didn't look away from the dwarf leader any sooner than the woman did him.

She turned back to Loki when Tony didn't say anything further, having realised the less these people knew of him the better.

Odåni raised her weapon again; a barrier between Loki and herself and her people.

"Why do you want Gleipnir? Is this about _him_?"

Tony didn't know who _him_ was precisely, but he could make an educated guess. The last of Loki's good mood, no matter how horrifying it had been, was stripped away when she made reference to said unknown _him_. The entire length of the body against Tony's became loose with anger, and it took every ounce of Tony's willpower to stay exactly where he was instead of throwing himself to the mercy of the dwarves. They only had sharp things. How much could they do to him, really? Loki, Tony had long since learnt and no more proof was needed than this crazy, messed up day, laughed at pointy things. He then got creative.

"No." A singular bitten off word was more than enough to cow the dwarves, even though their intimidated faces involved getting ever angrier.

"Then what is the chain for?"

Loki kept tight-lipped about that, not unusually. Tony had been trying his hardest to wring that little gem of a factoid out of the god since he enlightened the engineer to the aim of his little quest weeks prior.

The dwarf thrust her sword forward again, but Loki batted it away with the palm of his hand, impatient and overwrought, almost sending it straight from her surprised grip with the strength behind the blow.

"Fine," she spat and he snarled back, reactionary as always. "Keeping quiet has secured our refusal."

He huffed out a chortle, ugly and ill-humoured, growling, "You speak as though you hadn't made up your mind immediately. Your rejection is of no surprise to me."

"Then why did you come here if you knew our answer? And do not even consider lying, Liesmith. It will cost you dearly."

"Cost me what, precisely? I have nothing to lose."

Her eyes sparkled with interest, ignited by the bet Loki mindlessly handed out. Odåni's eyes flickered to Tony, whilst Loki needed not to follow to understand her meaning. Tony pressed himself fully against Loki in an attempt to avoid being stabbed in the eye by an overzealous dwarf with a crooked yellow smile.

"Thanks." He spat towards the sorcerer, who merely rolled his eyes.

"Please rid me of a nuisance." He said earnestly to the dwarven leader, earning himself an embittered protest and a bodily shove from the puny human who felt entirely too helpless in this turn of circumstances.

The sword lowered suddenly, and Tony dared a peer around Loki's shoulder for an answer as to why, just to see the curious narrowing of Odåni's eyes. She had obviously wanted answers more than blood all over her floor.

"Why did you come here, Asgardian?"

Loki didn't answer her. Loki had a bad habit of keeping mum when the situation really called for the opposite. Damned him, too stubborn for his own good.

Odåni, however, saw something Tony had not in all the times he'd had this very same conversation several times over. Her expression displayed a dawning of understanding with no shortage of surprise. The nasty humour made itself clear again in her tone.

"You're desperate."

A strange assumption, considering Tony had spent the last few weeks with Loki coming to the very opposite conclusion. As far as Tony had been aware, Loki really hadn't been trying very hard to find the dwarves or the rope at all. At least, not until this morning when an accidental stumbling upon an ogre had them both tumbling down this crazy rabbit hole.

But Loki didn't move to correct her, and perhaps it had been Tony who was wrong all along. Maybe Loki was better at hiding his emotions than even Tony was giving him credit for.

The dwarf woman took a step back. She considered the ex-prince of Asgard very seriously. A few dwarves took note of her expression and started to protest. She simply raised her hand and they immediately fell silent. Neat trick. Must be nice to have that much obedience. To get the same effect, Tony would have to install StarkTech locks and sound-proof glass everywhere. Loki would have to use magic. Both just as effective and they achieved the same ends, but hers was symbolically significant. It was a little awe-inspiring actually.

"We'll lead you out." She said. Stiffly, Loki nodded, but then he hadn't expected any different result to come of this venture. Truthfully, Tony was just glad he was alive.

The warriors moved aside, only a few of them joining the original rag-tag group of guards which patrolled the tunnels to guide them safely away. No one tried to talk to the two of them, and they kept their distance. Tony was the only one daring enough to keep close to the fuming god, and not even he was _happy_ about it.

"Leave us." Loki spat when they found themselves in another cave. It was mercifully empty, Tony saw, as he was unsure about whether he was capable of dealing with another ogre today. Or ever again.

The dwarves were happy to comply, closing the hidden door behind them with nary a whisper to punctuate their snappy farewells. It was like they were never here at all, and not even Tony could pinpoint precisely where the entrance had been even he'd just walked straight out of it.

Tony turned to eye Loki cautiously when the silence stretched too thin, but then the man was storming out of the cave and heading back towards the forest outside.

With a deep sigh, Tony looked up to sky, saw it wasn't even midday yet. It felt like it had been so much longer.

\--

The night found Loki brooding. The same as he had been all afternoon.

Tony was lying on the flattest stretch of land he could find, resting and comfortable and lazy. Neither of them had moved since they'd settled here just after noon, and nor had they managed more than a few fractured attempts at conversation - mostly from Tony's end.

Loki was being difficult. Not that Loki wasn't always difficult, but he was being _particularly_ difficult now. Tony chalked it up to the inevitable disappointment of being caught at a dead-end with no way forward. The god had made it very clear that the dwarves were the only ones with the know-how to make the rope he wanted, this Gleipnir, and so being denied was like a kick in the teeth. Despite having expected it, he was still despondent.

Because Odåni had been right: he _was_ desperate.

Tony wondered absently what they were going to do next, whilst keeping his eye on Loki but mostly staring upwards to the sky.

Loki was adamantly against sleeping in clearings for one reason or another Tony never listened to, but tonight he'd allowed it when Tony pleaded. Tony was able to watch the stars as he lay in silence, waiting to drift off and end this topsy-turvy day, observing how the constellations had shifted with the location of the planet, how strange they seemed from here.

Loki leaned against a tree staring into the low fire as it flickered frantically, thriving despite the lack of fuel. They'd run out of the kindling Tony had collected two hours ago, and at this point it was Loki's jittery nerves and responsive magic that was keeping it stubbornly alight.

Tony could only guess at what was going through Loki's quicksilver mind, because the sorcerer had been down and up and down again like a yo-yo, mood fluctuating to a such a degree as to make a hormonal teenager green with envy. Tony didn't know how to deal with that. _He_ was usually the insane one of the group, and it was kind of sobering to find someone who was so far off the scale even _Tony Stark_ was worried about him.

He thought back to the first few days he'd been with Loki, and how he'd initially been prone to thoughts of the god abandoning him, as he had done briefly in Norway. Tony had stayed up late into the night several times, restless with trying to convince himself he was okay with it if Loki did.

Tony realised he was nervous about that all over again. He glanced over to the moody man on the opposite side of the fire, and tried to find some words of cheer which weren't all hopelessly pathetic or nonsensical drivel. But Tony wasn't good with consolidation, never had been and never would be and had never really tried, so what came out was understandably pitiful.

"It sucks."

Loki looked to him blankly, and maybe he was confused or maybe he just didn't care anymore. Either way, Tony was cursing his mouth and trying to find a way to get rid of that haunting vacant expression.

"That they didn't help, I mean. That really..." No, there was no other appropriate alternative intransitive which quite summed up what Tony was trying to imply. " _Sucks_."

He sighed when his companion offered no reply, staring up into the stars as if looking for answers there. "They didn't even consider it, the rude dickheads. They were so caught up in you and who you are and what you've done, and although it sounds fascinating and potentially eye-opening, what are you really going to do with this one little thing? Yeah, it's annoying," Tony shrugged, more to himself than to anything else, "And that's two weeks we're never getting back, but at least we can move on now. Pick our battles, find a new quest, maybe somewhere with a bed. I mean, so what if they didn't give you the rope-"

"It's a chain." Loki interrupted sharply, startling Tony with his voice when the human was quite prepared to steam ahead with his rant regardless of what the audience thought. Nervous babbling was a thing with him.

"What?"

"It's a chain. Gleipnir is a chain."

Tony paused, unsure, feeling like he missed something. "Does that make a difference?"

Loki looked up, shaking his head free of demons and the ghostly echoes which danced behind his eyes. "No. I didn't realise, is all."

Tony was just about ready to close the lid on _one_ myth, because Loki didn't have reason to look so tormented over just anything, but he didn't want to ask for confirmation on something so personal when the god was wearing _that_ face. Loki had pointedly _not_ killed Tony on a few marked occasions today, and Tony was sensible enough to want to make sure it remained that way.

Instead, he decided to needle at the other sensitive issue, because his survival instinct was glitchy at best: he wanted to know more about the all-important chain that had slipped straight through Loki's fingers.

"What is Gleipnir, anyway?"

"It is an unbreakable chain, as I've mentioned before. The strongest of all bindings."

"What do we need an unbreakable chain for?" Because Tony still had no idea why Loki's shopping list seemed to involve indestructible bindings. It no doubt meant something ominous, or something _really_ kinky. 

"If you know what's good for you, you will not ask that question." Ominous, then. Loki didn't seem the type to be shy about his preferences.

"Will not asking cause harm to other people? Because I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with that."

"Asking _will_ cause harm to _you_ , Stark."

"Yeah, you implied that."

Loki snarled and flexed his fingers. Tony yelped when the fire expanded rapidly, coming much too close to his face.

"Alright, I get it. No more questioning your motivations." He snapped, shifting away from the flames which slowly returned to their agitated dance in the centre of the clearing.

He settled again, eventually even feeling safe enough to roll back to where he'd been before, now only a little grumpy and wary enough not to ask Loki about the details of his plans again. At least for tonight.

"So, what now?" He instead questioned, because if Loki shook him awake at the ass-crack of dawn wanting to get to another realm before nightfall without telling Tony beforehand, the human was going to throttle him.

"We wait." Loki replied, quieter but no less stern than before, and Tony yawned and nodded.

"Okay."

"Okay?" The god asked, seemingly perplexed.

"Yeah." Tony shrugged, settling in closer to the warmth of the fire for the night. "Okay."

He missed the look Loki shot him, because he had long since reached point where he'd had just about enough of today and now all he wanted to do was sleep. So, sleep he did.

\--

If Tony dreamt, it tended to be of fairly inconsequential things. Donuts, whiskey, a chemical explosion in the lab, a flash of strawberry blond hair. Things that, when he woke up, he realised he missed with an almighty ache. Whiskey especially, since the only chance Tony had of getting a drink had been whatever Loki procured out of thin air, mainly sweet ales and mead. That would have been fine at a push, Tony would take whatever he was given with a high enough alcohol content, but then Loki went and spoiled it by monitoring Tony's intake with the severity of a drill sergeant.  

"This is much more potent than Midgardian attempts at drink." He warned, and then wouldn't listen when Tony tried insisting that he had an iron liver. That if it hadn't given up yet, it never would. Loki ignored him.

Sometimes Tony would dream about the cave, or Obi, and he woke from them silently, feeling raw and hollow, but the dreams quickly faded and he was capable of sleeping again without disturbing the slumbering god beside him.

Tonight was different. Tonight was something new, something vivid, and something that felt distressingly real. Tony was terrified.

Before him stood an armoured creature, looming and snarling with an animalistic face and too many teeth. Tony had no protection, no weapon, no anything. He didn't even have Loki by his side to help him. He was completely alone against his death, and when a claw hand swiped at him fatally, the most he could do was hold up an arm to block, a pitiful defence, and hope for the best-

He woke up suddenly, body aquiver as he began to realise he wasn't dead. He wasn't injured. The phantom pain which had snapped him so sharply back to consciousness lingered, but now it was more uncomfortable than agonizing, and easing by the second.

He looked over to Loki, wondering if he had woken him up, just to see two shady eyes looking back. In the dim light they looked a shade darker, heavier. Perhaps it was just sleep deprivation or Tony projecting, but Loki seemed wretched with emotion, eyes still blinking away a nightmare of his own.

"Bad dream?" Tony asked, but Loki didn't reply.

They didn't talk about it later.

\--

"Tell me why we're heading back this way." Tony asked into the early morning air, because, as far as he was aware, they were going back to where the dwarves had pointedly _kicked them out_.

"We're alive, Stark. Have you noticed?"

"You know, it's funny, but this morning I actually _hadn't_ until you pointed it out just now. Now can't stop thinking about how much I like life." Tony wasn't eager to see the dwarves again, or invade their home twice in two days, or be once again threatened by varying sizes of weapons forged solely for overcompensation.

Loki rolled his eyes, but it was patient enough for Tony to recognise Loki's good humour. "They didn't _kill_ us, I mean."

"It was a close call." Tony reminded him sourly, because they very almost hadn't made it out unscathed.

"My point. They don't let anyone leave their sanctuary, much less with knowledge of a way back in. Much less _me_."

"You're a prince, right?" For some reason, Tony knowing that made Loki flinch. The inventor pressed on regardless. "Maybe that's why. You've got diplomatic immunity."

"And how does that explain _your_ survival?"

Tony didn't even think about it. "I'm kinda the prince of my planet." He said with a smile, before scratching that and correcting it. "No, my dad's dead, that means I'm king. I'm one of the richest and most successful and most intelligent people on Earth. I should have immunity too."

"Then why were you running away from your kingdom, your highness?" Loki scoffed.

Tony scrunched up his nose in distaste. "Yeah, okay, I don't like that. King Tony has a nice ring to it, but I don't think I can handle all that responsibility."

Loki was in such a positive mood, it seemed, that he didn't even press Tony for the answer to the question he'd so brashly ignored.

"It was an invitation," he told Tony when the human inquired after Loki's mindset. "They want to upset me, make me want the chain _more_. Further, they need to be seen at least making a token protest."

"But?"

"But they also know that I must have something to bargain with. Something worth more than they can conceive of. They weren't paid for Gleipnir originally, you see. My fa- _Odin_ bullied them into making it; threatened he'd set Fenrisúlfr upon this realm should they not comply."

"Well, I guess that's one way to browbeat a warrior race into submission." Tony agreed. Loki hummed.

"Whereas they believe that surely, to have the gall to ask for the chain, I must have something of value to swap them for. Quite especially since, for the time being, I don't enough power behind me to be considered much more of a threat than," he glanced disgustedly at Tony, though the human knew it wasn't Tony himself which dismayed the god. Not completely. He didn't take offence. "No more of a threat you, Stark."

"I can be dangerous." Tony protested with a half-glare; it was something he'd been insisting at least once a day since he met Loki. Loki had yet to not laugh at him. "Just wait until you see my suit."

"I do hope that isn't some kind of strange euphemism."

"Oh, cheekbones, you'd have to be _blind_ to miss my innuendos. No, it's literally a suit."

"Why would a suit make you dangerous? They are mere cloth."

"It's a _metal_ suit."

"That seems impractical."

"I think we've got a miscommunication here."

"Clearly. Why would you make a metal suit? I had come to believe they were formal wear."

"Not that sort of suit."

"Then I have no idea what you could be referring to."

Tony shrugged. "I guess it's more like your armour. Which, may I say, is the actual impractical metal suit here." Loki's vambraces may serve something of a use in a brawl, but his pauldron seemed to do little but to make him look a little bit bigger than he really was.

"It's ceremonial." Loki replied vaguely. "All my armour is. In an actual battle I go with only a chest-plate; anything more would weigh me down."

"And save your life." Tony felt compelled to point out, which was his precise justification for why he decked himself head to toe in metal. It was also partly a lash out against the only other superhero he'd had any experience of: Captain America. Captain America, who didn't dock himself in much more than leather britches and still beat the crap out of the Nazis. Captain America, who had his dad waxing lyrical. Tony was nothing if not contradictory.

"I've rarely been injured in battle, Stark. Even upon accidents, I am more than capable of basic healing spells."

"Does that include ogre attacks?" Tony said, thinking back to Loki's mangled arm. "Because that didn't look very healed."

"I was very young at the time, Stark."

"Earth-young, or Asgard-young?" Tony had learnt there was a definite difference. When Loki claimed he was 'very young', it usually meant older than Tony could ever dream to be.

Loki didn't deign to reply, so Tony filled in the gap.

"Asgard-young. Gotcha. You didn't know healing spells back then?"

"Not to the extent to fix the damage once it had been inflicted. Not that I had much of a chance. She dragged me to the halls and away again before I had time to do anything."

"Sounds like a hell of a woman."

"Indeed." Loki returned dryly.

They'd arrived at the empty cave again, and Tony was surprised to see a trio of dwarves waiting for them at the mouth of it. One of them was huge, Tony noted as it approached Loki and only had to tilt its head by millimetres to look him in the eye.

"Are you the welcome party or the executioners?" Tony asked, but the dwarves ignored him.

The big one inclined his head to the side, gesturing them in. They followed the dwarves down the same dark, winding paths, and found themselves being told to wait by the grumpy men. Loki smiled smugly down at Tony who rolled his eyes.

"No need to be like that with me, princess. I never said you were wrong."

"You doubted me."

"I always doubt you. You're made of crazy." Tony pointed out. Loki's expression seemed to agree with him.

Odåni appeared eventually, followed by the same warrior troupe but wielding a different weapon. A two-handed sword was strapped securely to her back, and Tony didn't need to question why she'd suddenly switched to something much more obviously deadly. Loki had a look about him, and a certain glint in his eye that put people on edge. The inventor had come to see it as a sign Loki was having a normal day, and even took some amount of comfort in it. The dwarves, however, couldn't tell Loki's scary face from his resting one.

"You have come again?" She asked nonchalantly.

"You left the door open." Loki said.

She watched him carefully, steadily, meeting his blue eyes with her black ones, before drawing something thin and silver-tinged from a pouch at her waist.

Immediately Loki lurched towards it, only just managing to get hold of one end of the chain before Odåni snatched it away. He clung on tightly, refusing to let go even as she pulled.

"'tis exactly the same?" Loki breathed, running his hand over the dainty, soft metal, breathless with morbid fascination; equal amounts of wonder and disgust.

"No," the dwarf replied, prompting a sharp look from Loki. "It is not the same. It is almost unbreakable, however-"

"Meaning it _is_ breakable." Tony interrupted smartly whilst Loki bristled. Odåni sent the human a dirty look.

"What use have I with a breakable chain?" Loki spat, letting go of his end and tossing it back.

"What use have you with an unbreakable one?" She snapped back, exactly what Tony had asked the previous night, to no avail. Her question didn't prompt any answers from the god either.

"Perhaps more pertinent a question is what I intended to pay you for one."

"You would pay us?" Odåni sounded surprised. "I half-believed you would simply steal it away like your father."

"I would have paid you." Loki stated, ignoring the jab like a pro.

"With what?"

Loki, Tony noticed, only hesitated for a millisecond. "Draupnir."

The dwarves paid attention at that.

"That is ours by right!" One snarled, and Odåni's eyes blazed as she was reminded of the fact.

"And should you give me Gleipnir, I would have returned it to you." Loki said quickly, his tone cutting; a warning.

"You were the one who stole it!" Odåni hissed, ignorant of his threatening manner in her rage.

"And I paid for my crime!" Loki roared into the cavern. Odåni watched him carefully, considering something heavy, before dropping the small chain to the ground and pulling out an identical one which shone that bit brighter. Loki's eyes widened, but he stopped himself from reaching out rashly again. 

"How do you intend to procure it?" She eventually asked, which seemed a sensible enough question, suspicious as it was. Loki's answer was just as much so.

"I will get it to you before the summer solstice." He replied, but it wasn't good enough for the dwarf.

"That is months! What trick must you play for its rightful return to this realm? It will surely fail as many of yours do!" She was outraged at the notion, violently unwilling to trust Loki enough to hand over the slither of metal they had produced in a night.

"I swear by it!"

"On what, Loki Odinson?" He flinched at his name. "On your head? Like you did before?"

"On my," he breathed heavily, trying to calm his temper. "On my father."

"Not good enough. You have shown no loyalty to Odin All-Father in recent times. We know of your actions in Asgard."

Loki, it seemed, had nothing else of any value to swear by. "Surely you want the return of Draupnir?"

"Aye," she admitted after a pause, "But if we hand over this chain we have guarantee of your return. You can easily run and hide with this and utilise it for whatever monstrous purpose you can conceive, never to return to this land with the price you owe. I will not let you dupe us so easily again."

"Dwarves have never been easy to trick," Loki replied, and perhaps somewhere in there was a compliment. His face said he didn't intend there to be. He was spiteful instead, rigid with fury and hatred.

Odåni made a head motion, gesturing to Loki's left where Tony stood innocuously. Immediately the human was seized upon, his arms grabbed by two strong dwarven warriors who dragged him away from Loki's reach.

Loki snarled, spinning back to face Odåni as he'd turned to watch the commotion, demanding the meaning of her actions.

"He is our security. You will return with Draupnir before the solstice or we will kill him."

Tony was struggling against his captors, calling out to Loki for help, but the god did not look his way again. "Loki please!" He tried, but there was no reaction. Instead, the Áss kept his eyes locked on the dwarven leader. 

He said, "He is of no value to me."

"I do not think that is true, Loki of Asgard." She smiled nastily, channelling one of Loki's most well-worn expressions with little effort. "You must have brought him for a reason. He is seemingly useless to you, and yet you continue to travel with him. So we shall keep him."

"What if I need him to get into the treasury?"

"Then you will have to find another way. You stake so much in your intelligence and quick wit - surely you can figure something out."

Loki glanced around, looking up into the busy mountain with all its layers and life and activity, before turning back to the woman. "Do you not want to test me." He warned, voice several notches deeper. It had Tony glance up worriedly, freeze in his fruitless efforts to free himself, because that was a tone utilised seconds before Loki had a hand around his throat.

"Then do not test _me_." She replied, drawing her sword. She could read Loki's stance like any skilled fighter could; could sense from posture alone that Loki was ready to unleash hell. She was preparing to give back as good as it got.

Unfortunately, many of her other fellows were not as clever. It was them Loki lashed out for first, spinning, armed with throwing knives, tossing poisonous green magic with deadly efficiency, cutting down those who'd have posed the most immediate threat had he discharged his attack upon Odåni first.

"You would protect the mortal?" Odåni screamed, lashing out with her weapon aiming for Loki's neck. Loki dodged, twisting away from her blade as she slashed it through the air again and again, until Loki rolled from the circumference of her sword and waved his empty arms in a simple motion.

The room immediately dropped several degrees, hitting the dwarves who were so used to their sweltering mountain harder than it did Tony. The swarms of warriors not cut down by the Áss' initial attack were suddenly hit by a frosty wind, which stopped them short and consumed them in ice. When all motion died down, Loki waved his hands again, getting rid of the blue box which had appeared within them.

He observed the mess he'd made with unsteady eyes, which were, surprisingly, now blood red. Tony hardly had time to register that his eyes weren't the only thing which had changed, as a deep blue was being swiftly chased away from any showing skin by the usual pale peach of his complexion. Tony moved forward steadily, getting closer to where the god had wound up, several long metres away.

For someone so closed off, Loki was remarkably expressive. His entire mental state could be writ about him with a shifting of eyebrows, or the worrying of a lip. Tony almost stumbled when Loki had looked to him from opposite a very frozen Odåni, expression as far from victorious as could be. He looked closer devastated.

Tony looked down blankly at the bodies left lying around, for a moment beyond rationality, terrified and outraged and astonished. Faced with their careful braids tied with beautiful beads adorned across their heads and their beards, and burdened with the memories of their skilful hands and their immediate leap to defend, the only thing he found it in him to say was, "I bet they were actually really nice."

Loki glanced up from where he studied the ice sculpture of the dwarf, tearing at Odåni's grip ruthlessly to get to the new copy Gleipnir. His eyes were sharp and cold as the knifes now embedded in no less than six oozing throats, but he still found the patience to reply.

"I'm sure they were." He replied, not unkindly. A snap of Loki's fingers had the ice melting, and all the dwarfs - most having died within the icy confines of their temporary prison - collapsed. Out of respect, more for Tony than for any fallen dwarf, he closed Odåni's staring eyes with a gentle, bloody hand.

"That was it?" He said, because the chain was nothing if not lacklustre, dull and simple. "That's what we came here for?"

Loki nodded, silently slipping the chain into a pocket under his many layers of leather, before walking towards his human companion.

Perhaps Tony should have hated him, but at the moment, when there were thousands of frightened, horrified, grief-stricken eyes staring down upon him from higher levels like he'd had a hand in it, all Tony wanted to do was cling to something familiar. So when Loki laid a hand upon his stiff shoulder Tony didn't protest as the Áss led him away from the bloodbath.

They immerged undisturbed into a world with a clear blue sky, a shining sun, and a songful wildlife. Like nothing monstrous had just occurred underneath the grassy surface. It was an outrage, a slander, for the world to be anything short of mournful now, and yet it wasn't.

"Perhaps we should leave for somewhere more hospitable." Loki mused into the clean air.

And upon the words Tony felt nothing but sharp, cool relief, and he sank against the body keeping him upright. If Loki stiffened at the sudden contact, Tony was in no mood to care. "Can we? Can we, please?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, also I'm changing the title. Probably to something like 'The Champions'. I quite like that. Just so you're warned. I'll do that before my next chapter update. Thanks for reading.


	8. Part 7: The Branches

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long!

Thor found Odin on the balcony overlooking the Bifrost, as he knew he would. His father was not the only one who utilised these views for several varying purposes - from a spot for a small lunch in the sunlight, to peaceful contemplation under the moon. These past days, however, it had only been used for mourning.

Frigga came out here often, staring out to where the bridge stood broken and under slow repair, watching further than the naked eye could see. As an All-Seer she could glance under every fold of the universe, cast her eye upon the entirety of creation, simply to draw herself back under the gentle beaconing touch of her husband or her son which brought her to herself and them when she got too lost.

Thor came here for similar reasons, but preferred to purposely think on happier things. He'd look out, unable to actually see the Earth, but liked to believe he could spot it - that their tiny sun was somewhere among those stars, and by locating it he could keep watch over her. It filled the thunder god with great contentment, and allowed him to ignore his sorrow for a little while.

And Odin was no different. Consumed by guilt unable to be wiped away by his family, he would look to the spot in the sky where his youngest son disappeared for hours upon end. He would hope for news, pray to his ancestors with every breath for a chance than his son could return home. So far, he hadn't been answered.

On this very balcony, Thor, in an attempt to locate his brother and ease the minds of his parents, had been dismissed by Hel when he'd called for her. It had been an act of desperation - he had not seen her in the flesh since she was too young to even speak, and was nervous to speak to her now upon the subject matter he intended to discuss.

She had appeared when he had asked the heavens for an audience. She answered only the most interesting of calls, and this was _certainly_ a special case.

Thor had been surprised by her, to say the least. The last he had seen, she had been a disfigured, damage baby, no more than a few years of age. Her eyes had been white with blindness or madness, and the healers had reasoned that she had been beyond saving. She was no more than the unfortunate victim of an unfortunate coupling. Loki had been returned home after they had found the strange family of five, and the sorceress who had stolen him away had paid for her crimes.

But that was then and this was now, and now Hel was a tall and graceful woman with a fair face and a pale, silky complexion. Not one flaw marked her skin, and nothing remained of the frightful image of a baby too broken to treat which had forever seared itself into Thor's mind.

"Prince Thor," she'd greeted pleasantly, looking perfectly in place upon Asgard's grounds, despite the monotone colouring she inserted into the world. Everything, from her long, black hair to her flowing grey robes sucked the life out of her surroundings. All of the colour in the world seemed to wind up in her eyes, which were a very familiar, exceptionally vivid green. "I did not expect you to call for me."

"It is about your father."

"I had no reason to assume otherwise." She turned from him to view the Realm Eternal, taking in the sight of the broken Bifrost with great delight. "Oh, my! You certainly made a mess of it!" Her laugh was like the shattering of ice or the trickle of falling glass.

"Where is he?"

"And why should I tell you?" She asked, her fingers preoccupied with a long string of black beads which looped over her neck thrice and still came down to her knees. "You, who, if I am to believe the rumours, are to blame for my father's most unfortunate demise?"

"So he _is_ dead?"

Hel just smiled at him over her shoulder, before glancing up to the two ravens coming to circle their location.

"I do not believe I wish to talk to my father's killers." She informed him then, staring upon the birds which looked back with eager eyes. "That's not so much a reflection of my opinion of you as it is an excuse to leave. Another is that my brother would never forgive me for it should he come to know, and an even more persuasive reason would be that I simply do not want to. Find him yourself, if you love him so."

And then she was gone. Huginn and Muninn flew back to Odin, but Thor stayed still, staring at where she stood. As the ruler of Niflheimr as well as a potent mage, she had magic unlike anything else on the nine realms, and potentially power even Loki could not hope to match. He did not wish to incur her wrath by calling her back and demanding the answers she so obviously held.

He'd later report that she told him nothing, and that they could be sure of neither Loki's survival nor his demise. Her summoning gained them nothing but one less lead and another bout of heart-ache.

"She is beautiful, father." Thor told Odin and Frigga, both of whom had not the pleasure of meeting their grandchild anymore than the god of thunder had before met his niece. They all knew they'd lost the right to see their family many centuries ago. All the king and queen recalled of the girl was the same scarred, screaming, miserable creature that they had brought to Asgard, and they had not perceived how she had grown, how she had changed, how she had survived. Loki would be proud of her.

Loki always had been proud of her. At least, he had been when they'd gotten him drunk enough to talk of her.

Due to its overuse, the open balcony had become something of a memorial, with a candle always burning in a holder carved as a wooden boat, and Odin was there when Thor went about looking for him, watching the flame as it flickered.

"There's been an attack on Svartálfaheimr." He informed his father promptly, because niceties between them only led to more shared guilt. They had come to silent agreement that they would not talk together of their loss, lest they come to fully realise how much they blamed themselves. Keep the emotions for Frigga, who could soothe and care and pretend she wasn't hurting for the sake of her family.

"An attack?" Immediately, Odin shifted from his mourning to business, turning on his heel away from the candle to meet his son's eyes. "What's happened?"

"General Odåni has been killed, along with seventeen others."

Odin's nostrils flared in discontent. Thor agreed with him, since the murder of the heir of Kazlel was no minor happening. "Do we know who it was?"

"Heimdall was unable to see, for some unknown reason. There was a mortal present, but Heimdall reports that his features were unclear - like he was not able to focus on him."

"Is he the cause of this?"

"We are unsure. I do not think Earth has sorcerers able to cross realms anymore than Svartálfarheimr does, but I also believe we know less about Earth than we should." _That_ had been made clear when Jane had presented him with seemingly impossibly complicated equations, claiming that somewhere in those foreign letters and numbers was the answer to 'something huge'. It was possibly that, if not magic itself, then the Earthlings had finally caught onto something close. Their science was only a primitive form of Asgard's magic, after all.

"Then we must find this mortal, wherever he is. How did he even get to Svartálfaheimr?"

Thor shook his head, as shocked by the recent events and taken aback by their lack of knowledge as Heimdall had been. Understandably, Heimdall didn't often coincide with the feeling of surprise so felt uncomfortable admitting he had no response to give.

"If I may, father?" Odin nodded his head, making a hand gesture that allowed Thor to continue. "Heimdall has been deliberately blinded before, by only one person."

Odin turned again, watching his kingdom and the darkening skies beyond with a great heaviness upon his shoulders. "Loki," he sighed, as even if it was Loki, such a circumstance hailing his safe return was not one that would be cause for celebration.

"What would Loki do with a human?" Thor asked before he could stop himself, his mind filling in the blank edges of his own question with gruesome and violent answers. Whatever the reason, it was not for anything good.

"Send out a search party to Svartálfaheimr and beyond. Cross all the realms," Odin barked suddenly, his back straightening and his persona slotting neatly back into place. _I'm a King,_ his stance nothing less than snarled, and Thor instinctually replied with compliance. Son or not, this man was his ruler. "Do not leave a single spot unscoured. We need to find whoever, or whatever, killed the dwarves immediately."

"Yes, sir." Thor answered.

"We will get him, and he will have to pay for his crimes."

"Yes, sir."

"And, Thor," Odin approached him, Gungnir in hand and looking every inch the ruler Asgard needed, free of regrets and pain, and not for an ounce like the father Thor wished for in that moment when he was wallowing so deeply in his doubts. "Do not allow this creature lenience, no matter how he appears. Remember the blood he has spilt."

Thor left then, knowing he was dismissed, so to spur the warriors into action as early as possible. Better catch this man sooner than later, and not have Svartálfaheimr turn to their enemy.

He pointedly did not think on the responsible party he might be heading towards, and what he was expected to do if he did find him.

\---

"Surely there must be an easier way than that?" Tony groaned, slumping heavily against the tree he was sitting under.

"There is," Loki returned, his tone nothing short of scathing. "Unfortunately, I've been forced to compromise in order to ensure your weak, mortal body remains breathing. The branches of Yggdrasil are safer for a human than my usual method."

"And that being?"

"Inter-realm teleportation, obviously."

"No, you put me through that before. I distinctly remember surviving that trick."

Loki laughed prettily, mockingly. "Oh, dearest Stark, the furthest I've taken you is from one side of your miniscule planet to the other. Human beings are at least advanced enough to be aware of the size of the universe we live in, surely? The vast, complicated, riotous landscape of a chaos we thrive among? A mortal attempting a leap between realms would simply die in the effort."

"How come Asgardians survive?" Tony knew he sounded petulant, but he really wasn't keen on another tight-rope walk in that murky, silent place.

"Other races are built sturdier, you ludicrous creature." If Tony didn't know better he'd say Loki almost sounded fond. Only as much as a cat-lady speaking to her favourite feline, perhaps, but nevertheless affectionate.

But he _did_ know better. Loki was being patronising again.

"If you wish to remain-" Loki shrugged in the face of Tony's almighty pout, and his words proved to be a staggeringly effective argument.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Save your breath."

Tony hauled himself up, straightening himself up as Loki turned his back from their make-shift campsite and headed deep into the trees. He eventually took Tony's arm and transported them elsewhere else, equally as foresty as where they had left off. Tony knew they hadn't gone far, hardly a few miles to where they had settled down for their last night in Svartálfaheimr. It was a spot they had chosen due to the fact they were in the right direction of this realm's root of Yggdrasil.

There was the same quiet here which haunted the forest on Earth, and despite how jumpy Tony was - scared of vengeful dwarves hiding in every shadow - he knew he was safe here. Only madmen approached these parts.

"So, where are we going now?" He asked as Loki handed him the same glowing string that kept them connected and drew the portal, the human's voice a hushed whisper against the eerie silence in the forest. Unlike before, Tony was prepared for the way the world was immediately plunged into black, and had closed his eyes as soon as the magic started to shine.

"Vanaheimr. Open your eyes, and don't look at the tree."

Tony did, with a snappy, "I know," to follow, pointedly looking away from the source of the dull light. This time he found it a little easier, though he had to keep himself in check with long, careful blinks.

"So, what's in Vanaheimr?" Tony dared speak eventually, keeping his voice low and wrapping his hand around the golden thread a few more times whilst stepping closer to Loki. They'd been walking for a while by that point, and Tony had discovered he was less terrified, albeit more aware, of his surroundings. The silence was beginning to suffocate him, however, and he had to do something to break it.

The god glanced to him briefly, but didn't dare keep it up for long lest his gaze wander. "Peace," he eventually replied.

"If there isn't at least one bed for me to sleep in, I will come after you." Tony was a fan of fair warnings, and this was a threat he was willing to keep. The corners of Loki's mouth twitched and he nodded agreeably.

"Duly noted."

"What _is_ that scratching sound?" Tony then hissed, because within the dead nothing, the scritching against bark was almost like a gunshot.

"It's just a squirrel, Stark."

"A squirrel?" Tony snorted. "Of all the things you could have living on your big magical tree, you choose a squirrel?"

"I didn't make the decisions." Loki defended. "And I _did_ tell you about the dragon, did I not?"

Tony felt his stomach drop, because yes, Loki had at least remembered that detail. "It is real?"

Loki stopped for a moment, and the dull echo of his footsteps, having been a constant background noise for the entirety of their journey so far, ceased with him. When the human rounded on the Áss he saw that Loki had closed his eyes and was smiling gently. With a deep suspicion, but an likewise severe curiosity, Tony copied the motion.

"Do you feel that rumbling, Stark? That faint rustle?"

Yes. It took Tony a moment to become accustomed to the double loss of sense as both sound and sight were stolen from him, but eventually a distant creak and jolt of the tree they were standing on startled his balance. After that, it was easy to feel the constant shifting so long as Tony dared pay enough attention to it.

"What is that?" He asked, opening his eyes again to see Loki watching him.

"Níðhöggr." Loki spoke, a jumble of foreign sounds falling so easily from his lips, despite the distractingly British accent. It made Tony recall that Loki wasn't just a magician from across the pond; a belief he had found himself slipping into when his mind decided enough was enough for one day. Loki was so much more than what he appeared, and Tony wanted to dig deep and find what was inside, if only he could work up the nerve.

"And that's the dragon?" Tony guessed.

"He chews at the roots of the tree." Loki explained, gesturing to the floor. "He will eventually gnaw through them."

"And when's that likely to happen, d'you think?"

Loki grunted dismissively, because he didn't know. "Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps not for a hundred thousand years. The prophecies are distressingly unclear, as usual. Not that I trust them."

"Why not? I thought you Vikings were big into the whole end-of-the-world, doomsday and fate stuff."

"People make their own fate, Stark, and prophecies are made by those who fear them. They would never come true if others were not so desperate to see them proved wrong. They are a trick; a way for the Norns to write their own versions of history, where otherwise things may have turned out another way."

"You don't like them, then?"

"To put it lightly."

"So, what, there's a dragon here on this tree that the Norns say will destroy everything, and no-one is doing anything about it?" Tony wasn't happy with the thought that something holding the universe together was slowly being demolished. He'd excuse Earth's inability to help, since half of the planet was still trying to get their thick heads around global warming, but for an advance race like the Æsir to be aware but not do anything to stop it was akin to genocide. "Why doesn't someone stop it?"

"You expect me to go fight a dragon?" Loki read into his words, easily picking up on the unspoken accusations.

Tony could smell a trick question from ten paces, but answered anyway. " _Yes_." Because he'd seen Loki take down an ogre in under a minute, and he'd seen Loki walk away from a serious battle unscratched, despite being heavily outnumbered and outgunned. So, really, a dragon seemed like a logical progression.

"I suppose you'd like me to slay every beast rumoured to play a role in Ragnarök pre-emptively, while I do so? Judging them and executing them before they have time to do wrong?" And _there_ was the trap. Tony was just enough well-read to be aware that the correct answer here was a profound _no_.

"No?" Loki asked to the sharp shaking of Tony's head. "Then why should I put my neck on the line to kill the dragon?"

"Because it's not pre-emptive. It's actively tearing up the tree _right now_. Come on, it can't be that hard. You'll be doing the universe a favour."

"Perhaps your memory is faulty, Stark, because I distinctly remember informing you that these are creatures unlike all others. What was a dragon on your realm is most certainly not one here."

"You didn't seem worried about the squirrel."

"I never said I wasn't." Loki returned snippily. 

Tony licked his lips nervously, closing his eyes so he wouldn't turn around to the bark behind him, suddenly hyperaware of their raised voices and any ears that might be listening. If Tony could _feel_ a far off shake on a tree so broad they could walk hours without getting anywhere, then whatever it was that inhabited the tree would be able to hear their shouting from miles away.

" _Should_ we be worried about the squirrel?" He eventually asked, because in that very tense moment it didn't seem as ridiculous a question as it sounded.

"We should be _very_ worried about the squirrel." Loki's voice had dropped to a whisper, and Tony didn't approve the sound of the echoes it made, regardless of volume. It was still too loud, like a thud in the dead of night - far too startling to be anything but terrifying.

"Why didn't you _warn_ me?"

"Shut up." Loki snarled, slamming his hand over Tony's mouth, leaning close and staring at him hard. Tony's eyes were open again, watching him in return, keeping them both anchored and their eyes away from wandering in the wrong direction. "Do you hear that?"

Hooves, if Tony wasn't mistaken. He'd heard them the last time but hadn't paid them any mind.

Knocking Loki's hand from his face, Tony managed: "What, a deer?" before Loki shut him up again with a hiss and a clap of his hand to Tony's face.

"Silence."

And they stood frozen there, breathing shallowly, standing close, with Tony looking at the vivid blue of Loki's eyes. The dull lightly made them only brighter, ridiculously, and they were wide with anxiety and fear. Whatever it was, Loki did not want to face it, despite it seeming significantly smaller than a dragon. Perhaps it _wasn't_ a good idea to send Loki on a save-the-universe mission there and then, in case the creature down below truly was worse than Tony made it out to be.

Eventually, the clip-clop faded, the danger extinguished, and Loki breathed out a heavy sigh of relief, glaring at Tony all the while.

"It's not _my_ fault!" Tony made at least one attempt to defend himself, but it was muffled by the palm still over his face. "L'go!"

"Stark," Loki said, pulling him by the shirt front and bringing their faces close together. They were inches apart, Tony could feel the god's ragged breath on his cheeks, and it was not a motion made passively. It was threatening, and the human was rightfully intimidated. "You will promise by all that you love in this universe, and I mean _everything that you hold dear_ , that you will speak no more until we reach our destination. Do you understand me?"

Tony wasn't one receptive to threats - he'd had enough of that back in Afghanistan, and he had not caved to their barking orders. He didn't want to start now, and he most certainly wouldn't have, had Loki not seemed so big and all-consuming. In that moment, Loki swallowed up the rest of the cosmos and everything within, leaving only him and Tony, a puny, dysfunctional human, who knew when to surrender for the sake of his miraculously still-beating heart. Now was that time.

The eyes. It was something about those _eyes_.

Instead of daring to verbally acknowledge the god, unsure of how that would be taken after so dangerous a warning, Tony only nodded. This was a man who had murdered countless men for no reason other than a slither of chain. This was a man who'd do anything to get what he wanted, and if he wanted silence, Tony felt it a small price to pay in return for his life.

Whatever had gotten Loki so driven to the edge of his nerves - the sound of whatever ungulates were lurking in the shade of these branches - was not something Tony was going to risk trifling with. He'd much rather see tomorrow than die in this echoing chasm over nothing.

And so they walked on, silent and careful and slow, and they were both petrified.

\--

"We'll camp here tonight."

"You promised me a bed."

"We're in the middle of a forest, Stark." Loki waved a hand to their newest surroundings, unchanged from their last, barring some minute shaping of leaves. "You may have noticed."

"I have, and I'm sick of them. That's all we did last time. We should try different flavours of this planet, like deserts, or plains, or, I don't know, a _town_?"

Loki glared, and Tony raised his hands.

"Just a suggestion."

"Your suggestions are impractical, at least for tonight. I will find you a bed tomorrow."

Tony glanced at him dubiously, because he'd heard many things in his lifetime that were designed solely to make him shut up - mostly from Pepper - and Loki held the same general tone.

"I keep to my word, Stark." The god replied directly to the expression, but it did little to ease the mortal.

"You promise? On your mother's life?"

Despite the hideous frown and the fact Loki's face instantaneously turned several shades more hazardous, he nodded shortly.

"Pinky promise?" The inventor then pushed onto his companion, because if there was anything more binding than a pinky promise sworn on mommy's life, it probably involved crossing hearts, hoping to die, and sticking needles in various eyes, and Tony was a little nervous Loki would take him up on that.

"What is a pinky promise?"

Tony stuck out his little finger, pointing it towards Loki's chest. The Áss raised an eyebrow, before glancing to Tony for an explanation.

"Stick up your right little finger - like that, yes - and clasp it around mine."

Loki did so with only a brief bit of hesitation, wondering aloud what the significance of it was before Tony broke away the contact.

"Well, if we were in 5th grade and you broke a pinky promise, I would be officially allowed to renounce you forever. _Doom on you_ , et cetera."

That seemed a little too advanced for Loki's surprisingly extensive knowledge of Earth, but then Tony had noticed it was the more recent of developments which tripped the god up. Unfortunately for both of them, admittedly more so for Loki, modern day was where most of Tony's references stemmed from.

"It's just a promise to me that you won't go back on your word." He elaborated.

"It's a flimsy binding."

"And I'm sure you'd prefer to have made an unbreakable vow, but I'll pass. No magic for me until you can explain it in simple scientific terms."

"You will never have any magic at all, then."

"Fine by me." And it was. Tony had long since had just about enough of it, especially after these last few days. Until he could figure it out himself, he'd rather keep his distance.

When they had built a fire and settled, Loki deigned to elaborate on his plan for this realm. Not much, but at this point Tony was well aware of the consequences for pressing for more, and he wasn't much in the trusting mood with Loki as of late to risk it.

"We're headed south. Here is where the Vanir live. I think you will find them more hospitable than the dwarves."

"And what are the Vanir like?"

"They're much like the Æsir in appearance. Their culture is based on fertility, wisdom and," Loki paused to suck in a breath, before forcibly calming is temper. "And prophecy."

"They sound fun." Tony meant it. Prophecy or not, he could get behind people who live their lives around fertility and wisdom. Seemed like a better philosophy than most of Earth's governments.

"My mother is one of the Vanir." Loki mentioned off-hand.

"So you're half-Vanir?"

"No." Loki said brusquely, taking Tony by surprise by the anger held within in the word. The god could obviously read Tony's expression, considering that he anticipated what would next slip from Tony's lips and cut across him sharply.  "Leave it, Stark."

"I was just going to say that genetics doesn't work like-"

"And I said _leave it_. Keep your mouth shut."

Tony sighed, settling in for (hopefully) the last night in the wild for a little while, and did as told.

In the firelight and the silence, Tony started to think on what had happened in the last few weeks, wincing at parts and glossing over others, such as... such as the dwarf cave. If he thought on that anymore, well... he wouldn't know how to survive. It was better this way, to not constantly replay it over and over in his mind and fret and fear, and he knew it.

Instead, his mind went to Earth. It went to Pepper, it went to Rhodey and Happy and his workshop and his company, and it went to Jane and Darcy and Coulson and SHIELD. He started to think on all the crap that wouldn't have happened to him if he had just stayed at home, before stopping himself and thinking on all the shit he'd left behind instead.

To be honest, the thing he was missing the most was JARVIS. He hadn't really thought about it when he'd left, but with hindsight there was obviously no guarantee of electricity on a foreign realm. On a vacation it was clever to bring an adaptor for a mobile phone, but he hadn't had the time to think about anything like that. Briefly, when JARVIS had mentioned he was running low on battery, Tony had thought maybe he could get his hands on some form of power to convert, but that was only if Tony found himself in a significantly advanced enough settlement. Asgard might have been fine, but apparently, despite being (according to Loki) ahead of humans, Svartálfaheimr was not equipped with the appropriate resources. And even if they had been, they'd have never offered it to Tony. Not after what Loki- _No, stop_.

Taking this into consideration, the length of time JARVIS stayed alive and kicking was really quite astonishing. He was a testimony to the brilliance of all StarkTech - and the inventor wasn't going to be modest about his creations - but it was still disappointing that Tony hadn't made the phone more sturdy. Longer-lasting. Then again, he hadn't considered being away from civilisation this long. At least a plug, that was all he asked for.

JARVIS had been his long-term companion when everything had spiralled downward, after Stane's death and the over the next three, long, difficult, tiring years. JARVIS had been there with his quick wit, snark and ridiculous accent to ease the edge of the world when life became a little too miserable. He kept up with Tony, he understood the inventor like no one else, and Tony had relied on him. He was all Tony had at times, and he'd certainly been everything to Tony from the moment he stepped off their home planet planet.

The inventor _had_ noticed that the AI had been anxious in the last few days of his battery-life. Perhaps it was the counting down of the clock, but even the AI knew he would only power down. He would have reactivated back on Earth in Malibu, if he ever actually stopped. Likely his nerves hadn't been to do with that - at least, not completely.

JARVIS never got the chance to tell him what was wrong, and Tony never got the chance to grill him about it. Instead, when the charge was seconds away from full depletion JARVIS bade him a temporary goodbye, less stiff than he had been the past few weeks since they left New Mexico, and told Tony to be careful. The caring, temperamental bastard.

JARVIS had been the last shred of his past life which Tony had left to cling to. Now there was nothing, bar the clothes on his back and the boots on his feet, grimy and tattered from continual use whilst the human had been in a constant battle of city boy versus nature.

Now, all Tony had left to cling onto was the blued-eyed god who didn't like Tony on even the best of days. And that really sucked.

"What _was_ that on Yggdrasil?" Tony eventually asked, much to Loki's annoyance, but he couldn't stand to keep quiet anymore. It was practically all they had been doing since they'd crossed between the realms.

"Deer. Nothing more."

"Right." Tony nodded. "That's why you were so scared."

"I'm not scared of deer."

"I'm sure. I don't really know what deer sound like, but to be honest I thought they were horses. What do you think?" It was a sly question, because Tony _knew_ there was something more, and if he hadn't been mistaken there may have been the sound of something more person-like above the dull thump of hooves.

Loki's face was carefully moulded, and didn't show Tony anything more than a patient, tolerant smile. "Horses? What would horses be doing there?"

Tony shrugged. "You tell me. What lives on that tree?"

"Not horses."

"So, it couldn't have been anything like that, then?"

"No, Stark."

"And no one riding them?"

"No, Stark!" Loki snapped, glaring across the fire at the human in his charge. "There is no more than four stags, an eagle, a dragon and that damned squirrel on those branches. No horses, and certainly no people."

"I thought I heard voices."

"Then you're mistaken."

"Are you hiding something from me?"

Loki seethed, but replied: "Of course I am."

"Then tell me what it is!" Tony insisted, because they were both getting to the end of their tethers and it was monumentally unhealthy. "You're getting paranoid about _deer_ for Christ's sake! You need someone to talk to."

"And you think that someone is you? That you're someone I can trust?" Loki surmised, suddenly very calm, keeping the eye contact unwaveringly, waiting for his answer.

"You haven't killed me yet." Tony carefully replied.

Loki seemed to consider this, before sighing, defeated. He leaned forward and said, "I briefly believed I heard something more as you said, however the likelihood of it being the stags is significantly more substantial than of it being people. The power it takes to travel the tree is monumental, and incomprehensible to someone who does not understand magic."

"Then explain it in simple terms."

"I do not know anything comparable from Midgard." Loki dismissed. "All I know is that the only one from Asgard capable of it besides me is the All-Father, or potentially the queen if matters proved to be so desperate."

"How desperate is desperate?"

"To the Æsir? Only the threat of war would push them that far. However, there is nothing I've heard of as of late which would have encouraged such a drastic move against the Realm Eternal. Their last war was with Jötunheimr."

Tony shrugged, filing away the information quickly before considering other options. "Is it definitely the Æsir, then?"

"No." Loki admitted. "There are others across the realms capable of it. Hel, for imagine."

"She's the ruler of... er,"

"Niflheimr. And there are others on Álfheimr, and some on this realm."

"Right. So, what if it's them?"

"Since I do not know who they are or what they were travelling through Yggdrasil for, I'd rather avoid them than come to face them with ignorance."

"Could have just been the deer." Tony concluded glibly, because when Loki's eyes were all lit-up like that he tended to be more worried about the little things. When they were darker, to the point to where they almost didn't seem blue at all, he was much more open and less concerned about every single little bump in the woods. Tony preferred him then.

"Let's hope it was."

The human nodded, sighing dramatically and leaning back. "I think we've had enough excitement for one adventure, to be honest."

The god snorted, almost bewildered. It was a noise that said Tony had clearly not been on many adventures if he thought that. The human begged to differ. He rather believed he'd been on one too many.

"I'd just like five minutes of nothing weird." He said, thinking to JARVIS and to Pepper and to Rhodey and to home again, because all he wanted was a little time where he didn't have to be scared about hostile aliens and potential threats of war, or a dragon slowly bringing about the end of everything. An evening in with his friends and pizza and some crap films would do him nicely. It was all he'd really wanted for the past three years.

"We're leaving early in the morning." Loki told him quietly into the night, startling Tony in how unexpectedly soft the man sounded. "Get some sleep."

And Tony did, all the while mournfully dreaming of electricity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoops, I spilt Loki feels everywhere. I'm sorry. I'll try to keep them contained to pour them over my other fic, where feels are appropriate. My apologies.


End file.
